Folksinger/songwriter Kate Wolf was born on this date in 1942, and today’s classic song of the day is one of her finest tunes. The song is “Across the Great Divide,” and it’s an introspective tune about the passage of time and having the emotional resilience to keep moving forward. You can hear it in the lyrics:
I’ve been walkin’ in my sleep
Countin’ troubles ‘stead of countin’ sheep
Where the years went I can’t say;
I just turned around and they’ve gone away
I’ve been siftin’ through the layers
Of dusty books and faded papers
They tell a story I used to know
And it was one that happened so long ago
It’s gone away in yesterday
Now I find myself on the mountainside
Where the rivers change direction
Across the Great Divide
Kate Wolf wrote “Across the Great Divide,” in 1976, for Robbie Osman’s radio show of the same name on station KPFA radio in Berkeley, California. The show was named Across the Great Divide long before Ms. Wolf wrote the song, its title inspired by The Band’s song of the same name. Mr. Osman recalls how Ms. Wolf came to write the song:
“I took the name [of the show] from the song by The Band, without naming the show after the song, then Kate came to me one day and said, ‘Let’s take a walk.’ We went up to Skyline Gate in the Oakland hills. She didn’t tell me what she was up to. As we walked along she had a lot of questions about why I had named the program ‘Across The Great Divide’—what meaning it held for me, and what I wanted to do with the program.
“We passed the place where I once saw an owl and had been thrilled by it. That ended up in the song, and a lot of the other imagery in the song comes from what had been happening in both our lives at the time. We were both living out of suitcases in friends’ houses, both feeling very much as if our foundations had been shaken in some way. I think Kate wanted to write a song not so much for me, but for the show and how it involved people.”
Ms. Wolf recorded “Across the Great Divide” for her 1981 album, Close to You. Many listeners know it as the lead track on Nanci Griffith’s 1993 album of covers, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Ms. Griffith performed it as a duet with Emmylou Harris, and it is superb.
Kate Wolf was a San Francisco native who became a fixture on the northern California folk scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She released her first album in 1976 and wrote many great songs that got passed around amongst the folk musicians of that era. She ended up being a huge influence on a generation of emerging folk and country musicians.
Unfortunately, Kate Wolf’s time with us was way too short. She passed away in December of 1986, of leukemia. She was just 44 years old.
