Cathy Fink recalls the warm and welcoming woman she encountered and the fun that followed when she decided to track down one of her musical idols, Appalachian singer and songwriter Ola Belle Reed
Ola Belle Reed sings at a Women in Country Music event at the Smithsonian Institution in 1984 with husband Bud Reed (left), Alice Gerrard (second right) and Cathy Fink (right)
American folk singer Cathy Fink has reason to be worried. It’s a few days after Hurricane Helene swept through North Carolina, laying waste to Asheville and sweeping whole towns off the map. Not only were many of her friends in the path of the storm, but also the second home of her and her partner Marcy Marxer, which lies in Lansing, North Carolina. This is the same town that the great Appalachian ballad singer and songwriter Ola Belle Reed came from, and Cathy and Marcy live “high on a mountain,” as in the title to one of Ola Belle’s most beloved songs. Though Cathy and Marcy’s home in Lansing is safe, the rest of the town has been destroyed. “In the morning,” she says, “I saw pictures of the old general store [in Lansing], which is a sort of coffee house and gift shop and sandwich shop. Apparently, the water hit well over six feet inside, and that and every other of the handful of downtown businesses were completely wiped out. They’ll all be starting over.”
Cathy and Marcy bought their home in Lansing after working on the Ola Belle Reed Homecoming Festival there. But Cathy’s connection to Ola Belle Reed goes back much further than that. “I became aware of Ola Belle’s music in the 1970s,” she says “when I started listening to folk and bluegrass music in Montréal. My partner at the time, Duck Donald, and I would drive down to Baltimore and visit my mother, and on every trip to Baltimore, there was a ton of music in there.” Baltimore and the Washington DC area, where Cathy and Marcy eventually settled, were home to a whole population of Appalachian musicians, including Ola Belle, who’d emigrated from the mountains looking for work. When Cathy moved back to the US in 1979, Ola Belle was high on her list of musical heroes to meet. “Eventually, I just made enough phone calls to track her down and get over to her house,” Cathy says, “where she did what she did for everybody, which is welcome me. ‘Come on in, there’s soup on the stove, there’s some homemade bread, and let’s play a few songs and see who you are and what’s up.’ We became very good friends, and Marcy and I also became very good friends with her husband, Bud, who was truly one of the sweetest, nicest people on the road, and a very good musician in his own right. Every time we were going up and down 95 passing Rising Sun, Maryland, we would hop off the interchange and stop in and visit Ola Belle and Bud.”
“Among the things that really strike me about Ola Belle,” Cathy says, “is that first and foremost, she was a humanitarian, first and foremost, she cared about people. She didn’t care about your background. She didn’t care about your religion. She would never have cared about your sexuality.” In fact, both Cathy and Marcy are gay, but “she didn’t care and we didn’t care,” Cathy remembers, though she and Marcy visited together and were clearly a couple. Cathy remembers another prominent gay folk singer of that era spending a lot of time at Ola Belle’s when his own home didn’t feel safe or comfortable to him. “You know, what she cared about is: ‘People are people, and let’s treat people well,’” Cathy says.
“I’ll tell you a great story,” she continues. “I got a call one year from the Sisterfire Festival, the women’s music festival run by Roadwork, who manage Sweet Honey in the Rock. It was produced locally here in the Washington, DC area, and they called me and they said, ‘We’d like to get Ola Belle Reed for the Sisterfire Festival. Do you think you can help us do that?’ I said I can ask her. So I called up Ola Belle and I said, ‘I got this call from a women’s music festival called Sisterfire and they’d really like you to perform.’ She says, ‘Well, that sounds good.’ And I said, ‘Well, you need to understand what kind of festival it is. It’s a women’s music festival. It’s probably nine-tenths lesbians in the audience and on stage.’ And she said, ‘Well, they’re people too, ain’t they?’” So Cathy and Marcy took Ola Belle Reed to the Sisterfire Festival where she received a fabulous reception. “Ola Belle on stage held court, no matter where she was, and no matter who was on stage with her,” Cathy remembers. “She commanded her space and that was a welcome vibe at Sisterfire.”
These days, it’s not Ola Belle’s classics ‘High on a Mountain’ or ‘I’ve Endured’ that Cathy thinks of, it’s her song ‘Tear Down the Fences’. ‘Tear down the fences that fence us all in / Then we could walk together again,’ the song goes, and Cathy says, “… it’s not just anti-war, it’s anti-everything that divides people.” It’s no wonder she’s thinking of this song, since Cathy and Marcy’s new album, From China to Appalachia, is all about bridging divides, bringing Appalachian old-time together with Chinese folk music via yangqin player Chao Tian. It’s an unusual combination that thrives on the differences between both traditions. “I think Ola Belle would love it,” Cathy says.
As told by Devon Léger
You can watch Cathy Fink perform with Ola Belle Reed, Bud Reed and Alice Gerrard at the Smithsonian Institution in 1984 below:
