Month: February 2025

Music

Ellen’s third new single: “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”

By on Saturday, February 15, 2025

This beautiful rendition of Bob Dylan’s classic was recorded at Wayne State University in 1968. The album cover photograph, by Patricia Clay, was taken at the same venue.

“Tomorrow is a Long Time” is available on streaming platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and iHeart Radio by following this link to Ellen’s DistroKid page. To purchase a download of “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” visit Ellen’s BandCamp page at ellenstekert.bandcamp.com. For updates about further new releases, please follow Ellen’s Spotify or Apple Music profiles, or check back on the Music & Performing page here at her website. Also, follow @ellenstekert on Instagram for updates and interesting stories about Ellen’s life.

Lyrics

If today was not a crooked highway
If tonight were not such a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all
Only if my own true love was near me
And if I could hear his heart softly pounding
Only if I were lying by him
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

Now there’s beauty in the silver, singing river
And there’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky
But nothing on Earth can ever match the beauty
That I remember in my true love’s eyes
Only if my own true love was near me
And if I could hear his heart softly pounding
Only if I were lying by him
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

I can’t see my reflection in the water
I can’t call the sound that knows no pain
I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps
And I don’t remember the sound of my own name
Only if my own true love was near me
And if I could hear his heart softly pounding
Only if I were lying by him
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

Credits

Released February 14, 2025
Perfomer: Ellen Stekert
Composer: Bob Dylan
Producer: Ross Wylde
Production Assistant: Bates Detwiler
Editorial & Publicity Manager: Christopher Bahn
Album Art Photographer: Patricia Clay

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Interviews & Press

Making a racket on Racket

By on Friday, February 14, 2025

Ellen is interviewed by the fine folks at Minneapolis news website Racket! She talks about her forays into digitizing her music, which started as a solo project for Ellen in 2020, during the isolating time of COVID-19, and helped spark the idea of remastering and releasing some of those archival songs.

Racket also talked to Ross Wylde, a young singer-songwriter from California who has become a good friend of Ellen’s and a real booster of her music. Thanks to Ross, the archival project has launched into high gear over the last few months: Besides the two singles we’ve released so far, an entire album of Ellen’s songs is due for release later this year. It’ll be called Go ‘Round Songs.

Read the interview with Ellen and Ross here at this link.

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Personal

Ellen and Jim in 1951

By on Saturday, February 8, 2025

Ellen tells a story about this family photograph:

“This is a photo of me and my brother, Jim. We are 16 years and 21 years old, respectively, and Jim has a new guitar he is playing. We are in our back yard making a good deal of noise. I believe we frightened all the birds. I am playing my old KEY guitar that I had covered with lumber varnish after I had stained it brown with shoe polish. I am just three years from having had polio and spending a year in the hospital and in Florida getting physical therapy. I had also learned the beginning skills of how to play, and not just stare at the instrument. I was in high school and Jim was home from college. I had not yet met the folk singing social group of friends in our suburban home town. We were located sixteen miles as the crow flies out of New York City, where the Folksong Revival was starting.

“I had already spent a year delving into the four volumes of Vance Randolph’s Ozark Folksongs that my father had gotten for me. He had read about them in the New York Times, and though he had little education, somehow he sensed that the four books would be important for me. He was right, although I think he never realized why. At first, the books were a mystery. But I was fairly solitary and I poured over them. I found worlds I never dreamed of and I struggled to learn to play the instrument well enough to unlock the secrets in those silent melodies I could not hear by just looking. They sat next to the verses and verses that were piled on one another. I could read the words and Iearned about sailors leaving for the cruel sea, old women who beat up the little devils when visiting hell, leather-winged bats that could talk, and cruel lovers who poisoned one another.

“Someday, I thought, I might be playing these songs on one of those TV programs we watched on the small box behind that giant magnifying glass.”

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Music

More new music! “Free Goodwill”

By on Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Hot on the heels of the debut of Ellen’s first archival release, “Went To the Sea,” we are happy to share another new tune—well, not new, but vintage and never-before-heard, newly remastered for your listening pleasure. “Free Goodwill” was recorded at a rehearsal in 1968. As far as Ellen and her team are aware, this is the only known recording of this arrangement. 

Ellen writes about the history of the song and her performance of it below, but please give a listen to the Bandcamp link first:

“Free Goodwill” is available on streaming platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and iHeart Radio by following this link to Ellen’s DistroKid page. To purchase a download of “Went To the Sea,” visit Ellen’s BandCamp page at ellenstekert.bandcamp.com. For updates about further new releases, please follow Ellen’s Spotify or Apple Music profiles, or check back on the Music & Performing page here at her website. Also, follow @ellenstekert on Instagram for updates and interesting stories about Ellen’s life.

About the song

Ellen writes: “I first ran across this lyric in Cecil Sharp’s 1918 collection of Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Volume II, p. 269). Sharp titled it ‘I Love my Love’. Interestingly, he makes no reference to other versions of the song, nor does Alan Lomax in his later collection, The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (1946, p. 45), where Lomax actually only reprints the Sharp version.

“This version of the song ‘Sharp Prints’, which he attributes to a Mrs. Ellen Webb of North Carolina, is a small gem with a lyrical flowing melody and austere poignant verses that contain numerous floating phrases from British lyric tradition. I found the song sometime in the 1950s and sang it in programs numerous times. I even sent a recorded rendition that I did of it to a well-known performer in the 1970s, but nowhere else did I find versions of it.

“The trail of tradition for this song was invisible to me and as I finished my studies and gained a Ph.D. never finding a trace of it, I began to think that Cecil Sharp may have composed it himself and slipped it into his marvelous collection of songs. However, now I favor the theory that Mrs. Ellen Webb might well have composed the song herself or at least creatively chose to perpetuate it by singing it for Sharp. (The people in the mountains realized that Cecil Sharp was there to collect songs and ‘preserve’ them.)

“The words Ellen Webb sings, as found in the Southern Mountain collection, are those of a lover who declares love for a woman. Now, It is not unusual for women singers in the Anglo-American tradition to sing songs in which a man is the protagonist, or for men to sing songs in which a woman is the voice in the text. However, in this case, where ‘All my friends fell out with me because I kept my love’s company,’ the song might well be speaking of a same-sex relationship, which would have accounted for the ‘I’ of the song having ‘fallen out’ of the company of her peers. Indeed, in the early 1900s in the Appalachians, such a same-sex relationship would have been taboo, I would venture that this might well be one of the few cases of a lyric being collected by Cecil Sharp that speaks of same-sex love.

“Interestingly, when I sang the song, as you hear it now from the early 1960s, I changed Ellen Webb’s pronouns and sang it as though it were being sung to a male lover. The concert culture to which I performed never noted my ‘closet version’ (as I call it today), and the beauty of the melody and the text still conveyed the intensity of the piece, regardless of who wrote it for whom…which is how I hope it will be heard today.”

Lyrics

All my friends fell out with me
Because I kept my love’s company
But let them say or do what they will
I love my love with a free goodwill

Over the mountain, I must go
Because my fortune is so low
With an aching heart and a troubled mind
For leaving my true love behind

The moon above looks down and see
The parting of true love and me
It’s as hard to part the moon and sky
As it is to part true love and I

When I have gold, he has his part
When I have none, he has my heart
And he won it too with a free goodwill
And upon my honor, I love him still

The winter’s passed, and the summer’s come
The trees are blooming one by one
And if my true love chooses for to stay
I’ll stay with him ’till the break of day

For all my friends fell out with me
Because I kept my love’s company
But let them say or do what they will
I love my love with a free goodwill

Credits

Released January 31, 2025
Perfomer: Ellen Stekert
Composer: Traditional
Producer: Ross Wylde
Production Assistant: Bates Detwiler 
Editorial & Publicity Manager: Christopher Bahn

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