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      Pablo Milanés, Troubadour of the Cuban Revolution, Dies at 79

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      His music blended traditional idioms with pop inflections and social themes, earning him comparisons with Bob Dylan.Pablo Milanés, a Cuban musician whose blend of folk idioms, pop influences and themes of love both personal and patriotic earned him a reputation as the Bob Dylan of Latin America, died on Tuesday in Madrid. He was 79.His son Fabien Pisani confirmed the death, in a hospital, and said the cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder.Mr. Milanés, known to fans as Pablito, was a founding member of nueva trova, a musical movement that emerged in the late 1960s and infused traditional Cuban arrangements with social and political themes.He wrote songs to accompany the dramatic changes sweeping across Cuba in the wake of the 1959 revolution, making him and the two other founders of nueva trova, Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola, its unofficial troubadours.“The success of Silvio and Pablo is the success of the revolution,” Fidel Castro said during a reception for Mr. Rodríguez and Mr. Milanés in 1984.Mr. Milanés, left, with his fellow nueva trova musician Silvio Rodríguez in 1983. “The success of Silvio and Pablo,” Fidel Castro once said, “is the success of the revolution.”Prensa Latina, via AP ImagesMr. Milanés’s influence spread beyond Cuba. As the revolutionary tides that swept over Latin America in the 1960s receded in the face of right-wing authoritarians in the 1970s, songs of his like “Yo No Te Pido” and “Cuba Va” became anthems of the continental left, sung in dissident meetings and among exile communities.“To millions of Latin Americans, Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés and their guitars are as much a symbol of Cuba and its revolution as Fidel Castro and his beard,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times in 1987.With his gentle guitar work and a voice poised on the edge between tenor and baritone, Mr. Milanés performed songs that were not, on their surface at least, about class struggle and revolution, but instead about love, longing and the beauty of the Cuban countryside.In 1970 he wrote one of his most famous songs, “Yolanda,” dedicated to his wife at the time, Yolanda Benet, after the birth of their daughter Lynn.“This can’t be more than a song/I would like it to be a declaration of love,” he sang. “If you miss me I will not die/If I have to die I want it to be with you.”Nevertheless, his close identification with the Cuban government made him a controversial figure among Cuban Americans. He recorded almost 60 albums, but until recently they were hard to find in American record stores; those that made it north were often smuggled. He was largely unwelcome in Cuban exile communities, especially in Miami, and radio stations that played his music reported receiving threats afterward.Mr. Milanés performing in 1974 for an informal gathering including the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, right, and the Cuban singer-songwriter Carlos Puebla, third from right.Jose A. Figueroa/Prensa Latina. via Associated PressHe toured the United States several times, coming and going with the fluctuations in U.S.-Cuban relations. At a 1987 appearance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a particularly passionate fan mounted the stage midsong, knelt before Mr. Milanés and placed a single red rose at his feet.“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” he told The New York Times after that show. “I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”By the 1980s he had established himself as an ambassador of Cuban music. He put the music of Cuban poet-patriots like José Martí and Nicolás Guillén to song. He oversaw the Varadero International Music Festival, which brought leading artists from around Latin America to Cuba. And he released a series of albums that revitalized neglected Cuban musicians and styles, especially those who, like him, were rooted in the country’s Afro-Caribbean culture.His love for the revolution was not always requited. In 1965 the Cuban military sent him to a forced labor camp; he was one of tens of thousands of artists, intellectuals, priests and gay people deemed potentially subversive by the government.In the 1990s he founded a nonprofit, the Pablo Milanés Foundation, to promote Cuban culture. It supported artists, published books and produced a magazine, but the Cuban Ministry of Culture dissolved it after less than two years, without official explanation.He became more critical of the government in recent years, as occasional flare-ups in dissident activity were met with official repression. His stance drove a wedge between him and Mr. Rodríguez, his old ideological compatriot, who remained closely aligned with the government and even signed a letter in 2003 supporting the arrest of dozens of protesters.Mr. Milanés suffered several health setbacks over the last 20 years and moved to Spain in 2017 to receive medical treatment. He continued to tour Latin America but rarely returned to Cuba, though he did make one last appearance in Havana in June.Mr. Milanés had lived in Spain for some time and rarely returned to Cuba, but he did perform in Havana in June.Alexandre Meneghini/ReutersPablo Milanés Arias was born under auspicious signs for a future revolutionary: His birthday, Feb. 24, 1943, was the 48th anniversary of the Grito de Baire, the declaration of Cuban independence against the Spanish in 1895, while his birthplace, Bayamo, in southeastern Cuba, was a cauldron of Cuban revolutionary sentiment.His father, Angel Milanés Aguilera, was a saddler and leather craftsman for the Cuban army, and his mother, Caridad Arias Guerra, was a seamstress and dressmaker who traded one of her creations for Pablo’s first guitar.His mother supported him in other ways: When he was still young, she moved the family to Havana, where she entered him in musical contests and sent him to the city’s Municipal Conservatory of Music to study piano.When he was 12, he encountered a group of street musicians playing traditional Cuban music, and he persuaded his mother to let him leave school to start his career early.Mr. Milanés was married five times. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Pérez, and their children, Rosa Parks Milanés Perez and Pablo; his daughter Lynn Milanés Benet and son Liam, both with his second wife, Yolanda Benet; his children, Mauricio Blanco Álvarez, Fabien Pisani Álvarez and Haydée Milanés Álvarez, with his third wife, Zoe Álvarez; and his son Antonio, with his fourth wife, Sandra Perez. Another daughter with Ms. Benet, Suylén Milanés, died in January.In 1965 Mr. Milanés released “Mi 22 Años” (“My 22 Years”), the dewy-eyed lament of a young man who has already seen so much: “Long ago, I longed to find eternal bliss,” he sang. Threaded with Cuban folk and American jazz, it is considered the first nueva trova song.His international fame grew through the 1970s, alongside the promise and struggle of revolutionaries across the developing world who often looked to Cuba as their ideological lodestar. He sang to Cuban soldiers serving in Angola, and he toured the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.He won two Latin Grammys, both in 2006 — one for best singer-songwriter album, the other for best traditional tropical album.His turn away from the Cuban government coincided with Fidel Castro’s decision to step down that year, to be succeeded by his brother, Raúl, who promised significant reforms. When those promises went unfulfilled, Mr. Milanés spoke out.“When one thinks of the reforms, you think they’re going to come united with a series of freedoms, such as freedom of expression,” he said in an interview with El Nuevo Herald, a Miami newspaper, in 2011.But he remained a devotee of the revolutionary fervor of his youth, and he never lost his legions of fans on the left.When a reporter asked Michelle Bachelet, the left-leaning former president of Chile, in July about a proposed change to the Chilean Constitution, she said it reminded her of a line from one of Mr. Milanés’s songs.“It’s not perfect,” she said, “but it’s close to what I always dreamed of.” More

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      Elizabeth Stewart, Champion of Scotland’s Folk Music, Dies at 83

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      She was part of a musical family of Scottish Travellers that furthered the nation’s folk revival and influenced its American counterpart.Elizabeth Stewart, a folk singer, pianist and composer who furthered the legacy of her musical family and the culture of the ethnic grouping known as Scottish Travellers through her recordings, performances and musicology, died on Oct. 13 in the village of Kemnay, near Aberdeen, Scotland. She was 83.Thomas A. McKean, director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen, a center for the study of folklore and ethnology, confirmed the death. No cause was specified.Ms. Stewart’s extended family, identified with the Aberdeenshire village of Fetterangus, is part of the Travellers, a group with a distinct culture and history. Many live an itinerant lifestyle, though the Stewarts were a “settled” Traveller family with a business dealing in secondhand goods when, in 1954, the Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson came calling at the family home and began documenting the family’s rich musical history.He recorded Lucy Stewart, Elizabeth’s aunt, and before long others made the same pilgrimage, including the American folklorists Kenneth S. Goldstein and Charles Joyner. Though Mr. Goldstein released an album of Lucy Stewart singing a selection of the traditional songs known as Child ballads in 1961, she did not generally perform for paying audiences or otherwise promote herself. It was left to Elizabeth to further the family’s musical heritage, singing the traditional songs of love, ghosts, war and hardship she had heard since childhood.“Elizabeth was a peerless singer, pianist, storyteller, teacher, dealer and raconteur, as well as a unique player of Scottish traditional music on the piano,” Dr. McKean said by email.“Behind her,” he added, “she had centuries of folk music tradition: the songs and ballads carried so well by Traveller communities across Scotland and further afield, the dance music and piping traditions of reels, strathspeys, jigs and marches.”She became part of the folk music revival in Scotland in the 1950s and ’60s, playing in dance halls and hotels and, later, at folk festivals. At the same time, the United States was undergoing its own folk revival, and the influence of the Stewarts and other musicians from northeast Scotland seeped into North American music.Ms. Stewart in the late 1950s. She became part of the folk music revival in Scotland in those years, playing in dance halls and hotels and, later, at folk festivals.via Stewart FamilyDr. McKean said artists like Joan Baez and Neil Young could trace their family roots to northeast Scotland. Others took a liking to the songs that originated in the region, including Bob Dylan, whose debut album, released in 1962, included “Pretty Peggy-O,” a version of the Scottish song “The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie.” The influence can also be heard in Appalachian folk music, which in turn influenced country music and early rock ’n’ roll.“The northeast of Scotland is one of the most fertile areas for folk song anywhere in the world,” Dr. McKean noted, “home to thousands of songs and ballads composed by ordinary folk as they went about their work and to entertain themselves in the long winter evenings.”Ms. Stewart recorded many of those songs on “Atween You and Me” (1992) and “Binnorrie,” a double CD released in 2004.“Listen to her delivery of ‘The Gallant Rangers,’ ‘The Butcher’s Boy’ or even the humorous ‘Little Ball of Yarn,’” Mary DesRosiers wrote in a review of “Binnorrie” in Sing Out! magazine, “and you can tell she comes from a tradition where the telling of the story is paramount.”Ms. Stewart also told her family’s story, interspersed with the music and lyrics for numerous folk songs, in a memoir, “Up Yon Wide and Lonely Glen: Travellers’ Songs, Stories and Tunes of the Fetterangus Stewarts,” compiled and edited by Alison McMorland and published in 2012.“For me,” she said near the end of that book, which is written in the Scots language, “the music is in my blood an when I’ve been sad, it’s made me happy, an when I’ve been happy, it’s made me happier! It’s niver a burden, an it’s teen me fae one side o the world tae the other.”Ms. Stewart and her siblings in 1960. From left, Jane, Frances, Elizabeth and Robert.via Kenneth S. and Rochelle Goldstein CollectionElizabeth Campbell Stewart was born on May 13, 1939, in Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire. Her father, Donald Stewart, was a soldier and later a laborer. Her mother, Jean Stewart, was a musician and bandleader who played multiple instruments but was especially known for her accordion skills.Elizabeth’s mother led a band that was heard on BBC broadcasts, and by the age of 9 Elizabeth was joining her onstage and on the air. In addition to her aunt Lucy, Elizabeth’s extended family included skilled pipers and fiddlers.“Tunes hiv been whirlin aroon in the air an in ma heid an hairt since I wis a bairn, an I wis composing tunes an songs even then,” she wrote in her book. “At hame I’d hear my mother’s beautiful piano an accordion pieces. I’d sit by my Uncle Ned’s fireside an listen tae his sweet fiddle airs, an I’d hear my ither uncles playin the pipes in the open air.”But not everything was blissful at home. In her book, she described her father as physically and emotionally abusive toward her mother; once, she said, he sold her prize accordion without her knowledge.Jean Stewart died in 1962, at age 50.Mr. Henderson’s visits in the mid-1950s brought the Stewart musicians wider fame, and he and Elizabeth became lifelong friends. Mr. Henderson suggested to Mr. Goldsmith that he come for a visit, and he did, in 1959, staying for the better part of a year. (Not all those to beat a path to Fetterangus left a good impression, however. “They wid come an take oor songs, an then go,” Ms. Stewart wrote.)About that time Ms. Stewart and her sister Jane reached a broader audience by contributing their versions of traditional folk songs to “Singing the Fishing,” one of a series of so-called “radio ballads” that mixed music and narrative. Radio ballads were innovative for the time in that they used actual villagers, rather than actors reading a script, to tell a story. “Singing the Fishing” was made by Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger (half sister of Pete) and was widely acclaimed, though the Stewart sisters’ musical contributions often went uncredited.“The songs that were featured in the broadcast went on to become world famous, and you still hear them to this day,” Ms. Stewart told The Aberdeen Press and Journal in 2007. “It upsets me when you hear it sung the way we sang it all those years ago, because we never get the recognition. We took the traditional words and set them to modern, pop melodies. They sounded great, and they still do.”In the early 1970s, Mr. Joyner arranged a tour of American colleges and folk festivals for Ms. Stewart. It was one of several trips she made to the United States.Ms. Stewart, whose only marriage ended in divorce in 1971, is survived by her sister Jane; three children, Jeannette Stewart Reid, Elizabeth Morewood and Michael Hutchison; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.In his email, Dr. McKean recalled his first meeting with Ms. Stewart, at a folk festival in 1988.“Standing in the lobby afterwards, she took my hand, looked me in the eye and sang to me, into me, and, it seemed, to me alone,” he said. “No one, and I mean no one, could put a song across like Elizabeth, sometimes so well that she herself couldn’t go on, overcome by the unfolding tragedy and by the constellation of family, history, love and emotional life that informs the songs.” More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Is Dead at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,” she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Dies at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Recording” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.That year, in the interview with The Times, she said that she thought music had the potential to be more emotionally powerful than other art forms, like dance or painting.“There’s something intangible and mysterious about music,” she said. “It can get you more; you can sob more. It’s got a stronger engine.”Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,’‘ she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

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      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More

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      Mary McCaslin, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies at 75

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      A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

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      Alice Gerrard Didn’t Plan a Bluegrass Career and Broke Its Glass Ceiling

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      Six decades ago, the singer’s duo with Hazel Dickens revolutionized the genre. As their albums are reissued, she reflected on her unexpected life in folk music and what’s next.For almost 60 years, death has rarely spurned Alice Gerrard. Instead, it has spurred the work of the consummate folk singer and inveterate archivist. During a series of discursive phone calls last month from her home in Durham, N.C., she was eager to remember the people she’s lost.First there was her father, Jerry, a British sailor who settled in Seattle and died from heart disease when Gerrard was 7. Then there was her first husband, Jeremy Foster, an avid old-time musician who was killed in a car crash in 1964, just before Gerrard recorded her debut. Suddenly a single mother of four, she made an album that became a bluegrass landmark. And then there was Hazel Dickens, the sharp tenor to Gerrard’s keening lead for nearly two decades, who died in 2011 from pneumonia after years of ailments. The sole survivor of a duo that revolutionized a genre, Gerrard soon made the album “Follow the Music,” netting her first Grammy nomination at 80.“When somebody dies like that, your father or mother, you’re left with this well of sadness that never really goes away,” Gerrard, 88, said with a soft laugh. “That might be one reason I’m drawn to these death-and-dying songs, these mournful sounds.”When Gerrard and Dickens walked into a church in Washington, D.C., almost six decades ago to record for the traditionalist record label Folkways, they were not thinking about starting careers or breaking a glass ceiling by becoming the first women to lead a popular bluegrass band. They just liked to sing together.Still, they did both: Their four hardscrabble albums helped expand the form’s purview, not only with personnel but also with the politics of unions, feminism and civil rights. The first two of those albums, recorded for Folkways, are set for reissue on Oct. 21, as stand-alone records and, together, as “Pioneering Women of Bluegrass: The Definitive Edition.”Gerrard and Hazel Dickens join Bill Monroe for the Sunday morning gospel sing at the Bean Blossom festival, an annual bluegrass event, in June 1970.Carl FleischhauerAfter the duo’s 1976 split, Dickens remained a genre star and an activist on behalf of the coal miners of her native West Virginia. Gerrard became a fervent documentarian, chronicling the songs and stories of community musicians throughout the rural South before they, too, died. She shared those tales in the magazine she started, The Old-Time Herald. Gerrard is now one of the few living links to American folk musicians alive during the 19th century.“I have always been interested in the lives of other people,” she said, excitedly remembering the time she tracked down the ramshackle homestead of the Virginia fiddler Emmett Lundy, born a year before the Civil War ended. “It’s not just the music. It’s the life that the music grows out of.”But now Gerrard is turning back toward her own life, something she has often resisted. She plans to crowdfund not only her first new album in eight years, but also a sprawling memoir that pairs a lifetime of photos and her conversations with folk legends like Elizabeth Cotten, Bill Monroe and Tommy Jarrell with her experiences making space for women in bluegrass and beyond.“Alice is inspiring as hell, one of those people who made the world a better place so those who came up behind her didn’t have to fight so hard,” said Rhiannon Giddens, who has in turn made bluegrass more inclusive as a Black singer, songwriter and banjo player. “She makes me want to keep telling the stories I tell and live the way I want to live, with or without the music industry.”GERRARD’S UNEXPECTED CAREER began as a hard-luck tale, the kind of tragic saga she might have rendered in song. After she met Foster at Antioch College in the mid-1950s, they fell hard for the rawest, wildest strains of old American folk, encapsulated by Harry Smith’s epochal compendium. They quit school when she was pregnant and headed for Washington, D.C., a borderland between North and South teeming in that period with old-time music and country. They roamed festivals outside the city and played house parties overflowing with folk music. That’s most likely where Gerrard met Dickens and, in late 1963, Peter Siegel, a young New York producer gobsmacked by Gerrard and Dickens’s sisterly harmonies.“For us kids who grew up in ‘rarefied’ or ‘intellectual’ households, there was an authenticity we wanted nurtured. We knew this was the real stuff,” Siegel, a New York native, said by phone from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “They were so emotionally authentic, an incredible voice. It rang so true to me.”Before Siegel could return by bus to D.C. with borrowed recording gear, Foster was dead. Gerrard, suddenly a widow without his paycheck from a naval laboratory, pressed ahead with the sessions. Gospel tunes like the fast-picked “Gabriel’s Call” acquired new brittleness, shadowy standards like “Long Black Veil” an extra gravity. While living with family, Gerrard survived on social security and sued the driver who killed Foster for $35,000, allowing the family of five to buy a space of their own. But it was the network of folk musicians — ad hoc babysitters, grief counselors, life advisers — that helped most.From left: Gerrard, Peter Siegel, Dickens and Mike Seeger during a recording session in New York.John Cohen“I was living in this big city, but there was this large community of musicians we’d been involved with. They supported me,” Gerrard said. “It was music that saw me through. It’s always been the community.”She reinvested herself in that broader network during the eight-year gap between the duo’s Folkways albums. (They quickly cut a follow-up, but the infamous label head Moses Asch simply forgot they’d made it.) She photographed and recorded the titans of old-time and bluegrass. She and Dickens enlisted in the tours of the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, where an integrated confederation of musicians trekked across the South for little money, reintroducing the musical heritage to the communities that fostered it. Gerrard often drove the cramped little van through the fraught region, the diverse roster making for a mobile political statement.“The people whose music we admired so much did not go on about themselves, didn’t brag about what they had done,” Gerrard said. She remembered Dickens’s facetious and lascivious tour rider, written on mauve toilet paper, which demanded daily lobster, sex and onstage martinis. The only thing they really wanted was water.In 1981, after divorcing her second husband, Mike Seeger, a fellow archivist and musician, Gerrard decided to commit fully to that community. She moved to Galax, Va., without the kids, renting a ramshackle cabin for $50 a month near the epicenter of American old-time music. She scoured the town for songs and stories. When she helped make a documentary about Jarrell, the fiddling master, with Les Blank, she befriended and even played alongside him, as she did with most of her subjects. Gerrard never pretended to be an academic anthropologist or folklorist — this was her life, not her career.“The young wanted to learn that high-powered stuff, so they weren’t interested in their parents’ music,” Gerrard said, noting she never felt like an outsider, because her enthusiasm was so unabashed. “It was a two-way street. We gave them the pleasure of being able to tell us their story and to know their music would live on, carried on by younger people.”Yet again, death compelled a fundamental change. She’d documented her elders and lived among them, staying up with the likes of the fiddler Luther Davis, then in his late 90s, to play until midnight. But then they started dying, a depressing reminder that this work wasn’t the only music with an expiration date. She had her own songs to share. “I needed to stop being the mentee,” she admitted.“The people whose music we admired so much did not go on about themselves, didn’t brag about what they had done,” Gerrard said.John CohenGerrard moved to her little house in Durham in 1989, lured by the music community there and the promise of state funds for The Old-Time Herald, then six years old and growing fast. She made solo records, started a string of bands and transformed into a mentor for area musicians.When the songwriter Mike Taylor arrived in North Carolina for school in the summer of 2007, he vowed he would meet Gerrard, whose voice on those Hazel and Alice records had long transfixed him. When they had coffee soon after he arrived from California, she eyed him with a little skepticism, a fellow West Coast interloper.Just as his band Hiss Golden Messenger was beginning to earn attention, Taylor worked as Gerrard’s assistant at Duke University, where she briefly taught a course in documenting traditional music. When he asked her to record an album with his friends, she agreed with customary nonchalance. She gave him the flexibility to add unorthodox chords and dissonant textures, creating a gothic folk that distilled her tragedies and hope into the graceful “Follow the Music.” At 80, she had made an entirely different kind of record.“I could tell she was rubbing against something she hadn’t done before, and she was into that,” Taylor said in an interview. “I get the sense from Alice that nothing is permanent, and that’s a profound belief when you’re working in traditional music, where everything is handled so gently because it might break. But she doesn’t live like that.”IN 2004, AFTER Gerrard had been in North Carolina for 15 years, she recorded “Calling Me Home,” a song she’d written in Virginia as she watched elders like Davis and Jarrell die. An a cappella elegy about letting go, the song stemmed partly from Davis’s lament that all his old friends had already gone. He had no one to talk to about their good-old days, no one to ask about the past. “That song is a direct reflection of a life lived and a healthy way of looking at death,” said Giddens, 45, who began playing it during lockdown livestreams. “That is not a 25-year-old’s song.”In September, Gerrard had a question about her past, some bit of minutiae that eluded her. She thought about who to call for the answer. Seeger, Dickens and Blank were all dead, as was an old friend named Ralph Rinzler, who had also been the Smithsonian’s former folk expert. “I realized there was nobody who would actually know anymore,” Gerrard said, pausing her usual rush of stories for several seconds. “Anybody who would have a clue is gone. I didn’t get to them in time.”Gerrard joked that she spends her days not working so much as watching horror movies and gory crime shows or teaching her dog, Polly, to fetch IPAs from the fridge and drop the empties into the recycling bin outdoors. Still, when she spoke of a half-dozen pending projects, like the album and the memoir, she sounded more energized by finishing them than daunted by the prospect of never having the chance.“Hazel and I really did something. There is still a small piece of me that has a hard time believing that, because we were just doing what we loved,” she said. “I have this hesitancy to award myself, you know? They have these lifetime achievement awards they always give you. My life isn’t over.” More