Sing My Whole Life Long: Jenny Vincent's Life in Folk Music and Activism

By Craig Smith, Ronald Cohen and John Nichols

Born in Minnesota and raised in Chicago, Jenny Vincent was educated at a progressive private school and Vassar College. Introduced to international folk music at an early age, she remains a performer and champion of this "music of the people."

In 1936, Jenny and her first husband visited northern New Mexico at the invitation of D. H. Lawrence's widow. Enchanted with the place and its people, they purchased a ranch that has been Jenny's home ever since.

Jenny believed strongly in social advocacy, which she expressed through song. She performed with such luminaries as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Malvina Reynolds, and Earl Robinson, all social activists who used music as a voice for world peace, civil liberties, and human rights.

Jenny and her second husband supported such causes as the Salt of the Earth strike, Native American rights, and the rising Chicano movement. Through it all Jenny raised a family and continued her music. In her nineties, Jenny continues performing, and in 2006 was honored by the University of New Mexico and the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Division for her many decades as a prominent cultural activist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: May 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780826342270

Craig Smith

Craig Smith has been a columnist at the Napa Valley Register for twenty years. This is his first novel. At first glance, he seems completely normal. But he loves to laugh and has a hard time taking anything seriously. Craig loves writing fiction because he can change anything he wants. He lives in Napa, California, with his wife Denise and a passel of cats.

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Introduction

Wild Horse Mesa is a stretch of ground along Highway 159 in southern Colorado that extends from the town of San Luis to the New Mexico state line. In daylight and at sixty or more miles per hour, you might pass through the mesa in fifteen minutes, barely aware of Blanca Peak in the Rocky Mountains behind you or the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on your left. On a starless night you can feel the pitch darkness tighten around you.

At 11:30 one night in the late spring of 2003, the headlights of a small van were the only stars that cut through the dark on that part of the road. Inside, amid assorted musical instruments and sound gear, the members of the Jenny Vincent Trio had fallen silent. It had been a successful evening for violinist Audrey Davis, guitarist Rick Klein, and accordionist and singer Jenny Vincent. The trio had played its signature blend of international folk songs, Mexican and New Mexican polkas and waltzes, and cowboy ballads to a full house at a restaurant in La Veta, a small town at the foot of Colorado’s Spanish Peaks. The trio finished its three-hour set at 9:30, and an hour later had been paid, fed, and packed into the van. A two-hour drive lay ahead of them, yet they wanted to return to New Mexico the same night: they were to perform at the Fiesta de Taos the next day. Now they were quiet as Terry Klein, Rick’s wife, drove toward Taos and home.

In the front passenger seat, Jenny was wide awake. That night she had recognized familiar faces in the audience, as she always does, but also old friends she had not seen in years, friends who reminisced with her after her performance. Jenny does not dwell in the past, but when she does reflect on it she can draw on nearly nine decades of memories. They begin with the sound of bells that announced the end of the First World War. In her time Jenny has been hailed for her work in public schools and harassed for her progressive politics. She has sung for war veterans and women on picket lines but never for FBI informants or McCarthyite committees. In all that time she has never wavered from her work with music as a means to break down barriers between people.

Suddenly, the headlights of the van illuminated a herd of wild horses crossing the highway ahead. Terry slowed the vehicle to let them pass, and Jenny watched the horses glance in her direction and continue across the road. As they slipped away into the night, they drew Jenny’s thoughts back over the people and places of her long life.

ONE

Gifts of a Lifetime

By the time Jenny was four years old, she had made her performance debut with a brief recitation in church—

Birdy with a yellow bill

hopped upon the window sill,

cocked his eye and gamely said,

Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepy head?

She also had launched her lifelong love affair with the piano, and got her mouth washed out with soap at an early age for saying the word fart. Two of her brothers thought it would be the perfect prank to teach their little sister a forbidden word. They did, and when she repeated it to her father, a minister, he responded with a spanking and a soap-laden toothbrush.

The soapy toothbrush incident is the only unpleasant memory among the few that Jenny has of her father, Fred Burnett Hill. Fred was born in 1876 to Edwin Frederick Hill and Grace Jeannette (Squire) Hill of Red Wing, Minnesota. He earned a bachelor of literature degree in 1900 from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he was a baseball player as well as a scholar, and a bachelor of divinity degree in 1903 from Hartford Theological Seminary. It was while he was serving as associate pastor of the Central Congregational Church in Providence, Rhode Island, that he met a young woman named Deborah Wilcox Sayles.

While Fred hailed from people who considered themselves Minnesota pioneers, Deborah was a descendant on both sides of permanent Rhode Islanders. Her father, Frederick Clark Sayles, traced his lineage to the state’s founder, Roger Williams, and was proud of it. An honors graduate of Providence Conference Academy, Frederick started his career as a day laborer in his brother’s bleachery. By the time he and Deborah Cook Wilcox married, in 1861, he was on his way to a partnership in the firm. Over the next three decades the Sayles brothers expanded into railroads, mills, and utilities, amassing a fortune estimated at $20 million. Frederick also served as Pawtucket’s first mayor. He and his wife passed on their political conservatism, appreciation of the arts, and sense of community responsibility to their children, including Jenny’s mother.

Deborah Sayles was born in 1880 and grew up the belle of Bryn Mawr, her family’s sixty-five-acre estate. She could sit on the front steps of a red brick mansion that was filled with paintings and sculpture from Europe and look out over cultivated gardens, grounds, and greenhouses. She appeared to want for nothing. But in 1895 Deborah’s mother died unexpectedly, and in 1902, on what would have been her mother’s sixty-first birthday, the twenty-two-year old Deborah was still grieving. My dear dead Mother out some where in the wide summer night, I write a note to you, she confided in her diary. I am such a lonely girl! I have nobody to speak to. Mother, don’t forget me in your grand heaven! That same year her father suffered a stroke, rallying only long enough to dedicate the Pawtucket library in his late wife’s name.

When Fred Hill entered her life Deborah was no stranger to suitors, several reputedly among European royalty, but the only one she took seriously was a Yale University student from Illinois named Frank Ferry. However, Frank could not dislodge Fred. The engagement drew storybook headlines from the society pages: Beautiful Heiress Spurns Rich Suitors; to Wed Poor Pastor. It was a love match, yet it also demonstrated Deborah’s independence of mind and her determination not to become just another wealthy matron. My future is not in society, she said. I am tired of the ballrooms, the idle talk, the butterflies, the aimless lives. I want an opportunity to relieve suffering and support and encourage the work of uplifting humanity.

Fred and Deborah married in 1905 and embarked on an extended honeymoon to Europe and Asia, where Fred was as interested in visiting missions as he was in standard tourist sites. In 1906 they returned to Connecticut, where Fred began graduate work at Hartford Theological and Deborah gave birth to their first child, Mary. The following year they moved to Northfield, where Fred had accepted offers to teach at his alma mater and to serve as minister in a Congregational church.

Northfield straddles the Cannon River south of Minneapolis-St. Paul. The town’s frontier days were behind it when Fred and Deborah arrived from the East, but its citizens still basked in the glory of having decimated the Jesse James gang during an attempted bank robbery the year Fred Hill was born. The Hills settled on College Avenue at the cusp of the Carleton campus, where daughter Mary was followed by Fred Jr. (Bud), born in 1908; Robert, in 1910; Edward (Ned), in 1911; and, on April 22, 1913, Deborah Jeannette. Jenny weighed eight-and-a-half pounds and was all good health. Oh, Jenny, Mary told her years later, I was so happy when Papa told me I had a baby sister.

When Jenny was born, Woodrow Wilson was barely fifty days in the White House, and south of the Mexican border Pancho Villa was ready to test the new president’s mettle. At home and abroad suffragettes were on the march, while Henry Ford was busy adapting the conveyer belt for his auto works. Scientific management and go-getter were current phrases. In Paris, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a near riot, while New Yorkers were wowed—or appalled—by their first glimpse of European modernist painting. Vaudeville was still in vogue, and audiences laughed along with Sophie Tucker and Sir Harry Lauder, whose recordings Deborah Hill