www.latimes.com | June 17, 2005

Dorothy Chase, who with her husband, Charles, founded the influential Folk Music Center in Claremont, has died. She was 85. Chase died Saturday (june 11) of supranuclear palsy at her home in Claremont. She had been in failing health for several years fighting the degenerative nerve disease. Her husband died a year ago at 89.
A native of Newton, Mass., she was born Dorothy Edna Udin. She was 18 when she married Charles Chase in 1938. The couple moved to Southern California with their four daughters in the 1950s. They established the Folk Music Center and Museum in 1957, which led to the Claremont Folksong Society a short time later. In the 1970s, they also established the Claremont Folk Festival. Over the nearly 50 years that the store has been in business, Dorothy Chase taught the intricacies of such instruments as the guitar and dulcimer to several thousand students in Southern California. She stayed active in the store until about seven years ago, when she was diagnosed with supranuclear palsy. Thereafter, friends and former students would visit her at home and sing to her. The grandmother of singer-songwriter Ben Harper, Chase is survived by her daughters, 10 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

Claremont musician Dorothy Chase, 85
by Sara A. Carter - July 02, 2005 | www.dailybulletin.com

CLAREMONT - Every once in awhile, a person leaves an indelible mark on the community. Dorothy Edna Chase was that person.
She was one of the few people who gave her life to others by keeping alive the music of old Appalachia - folk songs of political struggle and life. Her continuous smile warmed the hearts of all who walked into her store, the Claremont Folk Music Center and Museum, in the Claremont Village.
The 85-year-old artist, activist, friend, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother died on June 11, leaving an emptiness in the village she loved so much.
"She was the musical inspiration of the family," said her daughter Ellen Udin Chase, who has managed the store for the past several years. "She was an artist in every regard, and she engaged the community in her love for the arts."
Chase taught thousands in the Inland Valley how to play instruments such as the mountain dulcimer, banjo and guitar. And during the last seven years of her life, when she struggled with a degenerative nerve disease that ultimately left her blind and without the ability to speak, her students would come to her home and sing her the songs she so patiently taught them.
"She was kind of everybody's mother," said Doug Thompson, a musician who started the Claremont Folk Music Festival with Chase in 1979. "She was a great friend and just a sweet lady. She took people into her life and home - strangers who had no place to go didn't need to worry because she would say, "Come in, we have a place for you to stay.' "
The grandmother of 10 and the great-grandmother of 11 children found her love for music during a peace march in the mid-1950s when she watched a man playing a banjo and knew in her heart she had to learn it, her daughter said.
That experience led her to a music school named Hecht's House in Dorchester, Mass., where her desire to play had her strumming the banjo in no time and teaching others only months after she had learned herself.
By then she was married to artist Charles Chase, a man who stood by her side until his death last year at the age of 89. He never played music but he could fix everything, said Ellen Chase.
She was an activist who refused to testify against friends during the McCarthy era and made her way to California in 1957.
Shortly after arriving on the West Coast, she moved to the then-small community of Claremont where she lived out the rest of her days raising a family and teaching music.
"Dot," as her friends called her, and Charles Chase, opened the Folk Music store Aug. 12, 1958, on Harvard Avenue with $2,000 in borrowed money. It was a huge success and many aspiring and famous folk singers began converging in the village to play their songs, her daughter said.
Later, the store moved to 1st Street and then to Yale Avenue, where it still is today.
But there were untold stories about Chase that many people didn't know, Thompson said.
She consoled and drove a nervous Joan Baez, who got sick in Chase's car, to one of Baez's first live performances, at Big Bridges Auditorium, at Pomona College. She played the banjo with one of America's greatest folk musicians, Pete Seeger, who was with Woody Guthrie when he wrote the song "This Land is Your Land."
She touched the lives of many people and she changed the community for the better, Thompson said. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren have all learned, or are learning to play the instruments that defined her life. They remember with fondness the little things Chase would do - the grandmother who would take them on outings, embroider their shirts with beautiful caricatures and sing them lullabies before they went to sleep.
"It's so tough not having her around," said her grandson Joel Harper, an author of children's books, who still dedicates his time at the family store. "She gave us unconditional love and taught us the meaning of living a good life."
Recently, her grandson Ben Harper, a famous musician whose music is a reflection of the grass roots political movements and folk songs, purchased the family store to ensure its future in the community.
In the front window of the store, a photo memorial to Dorothy Chase draws the attention of both old and young alike who stroll down Yale Avenue.
"I remember her," they say. "I can't believe she's gone."

On November 18th (2000), eight storytellers gathered to pay tribute to one of southern California's remaining treasures: a lady named Dorothy Chase.
As part of an international event called Tellabration, storytellers and listeners alike gathered at the Claremont Forum, which had been turned into both a performance hall and an art gallery for the event. Around the walls were paintings by Mrs. Chase, best known as the long-time owner of the Folk Music Center in Claremont. She has also been the driving force behind many folk music and storytelling events in the area. Unknown to most of us, she has also been a talented portrait artist for many years.
So it was that the community decided to celebrate her at an event that celebrates one of her great loves: storytelling.
For years, her music store has been the connecting point for folk musicians, storytellers and others in the Claremont area. For years she was an active participant in a storytelling group as well. And there were also her Tellabration events...
Around the world, on the third Saturday of November at 8 PM in each time zone, storytellers gather in many places around the world to celebrate the art of storytelling. The sites vary from year to year, moving around as venues open and close, and as organizers find themselves busy with other things.
Each year, Dorothy Chase made sure that Claremont was on the list of Tellabrations. For that event, storytellers get paid little or nothing, because it's a night for sharing of stories and the love of storytelling.
The Claremont events always had a good list of tellers and a nice audience, each audience member paying a small amount to pay for any expenses putting on the show.
This year, Dorothy Chase was in poor health, and it looked like she wouldn't be able to put on her annual show. Karen Ray Kraut, a storyteller, and Rhoda Huffman, a lover of stories, stepped in and found a site, gathered a group of storytellers, publicized it and put on a show in Dorothy's name. The Claremont Forum, which had been planning to open a showing of Dorothy's artwork the next week, made special arrangements to hang the portraits in time for the Tellabration event. In keeping with Dorothy's longtime tradition, the ticket prices were kept very low. Still, with less time than usual, no one was sure if the local community would come out for the show.
They did...if not in droves then certainly in large enough numbers to make it all worthwhile. So it was that, surrounded by a room filled with Dorothy Chase's artwork, eight storytellers carried on a Dorothy Chase tradition: an evening of storytelling for the Claremont community. An evening of sharing, both love and stories. A Tellabration.

FolkWorks, May-June 2003 | www.folkworks.org

"The Claremont Spring Folk Festival will celebrate its 24th year this May 3rd and 4th at the Joslyn Center and Larkin Park in Claremont. It began in 1979 as a Hammered Dulcimer and Fretted Dulcimer Festival, but quickly grew into a full folk music festival with all kinds of acoustic music, storytelling and dance. The Claremont Spring Folk Festival is a non-profit event presented by the Claremont Folk Music Center Museum. The festival staff works without pay for the love of the music, keeping costs down and making it possible for the ticket prices to remain the same for the last fifteen years.
Concerts are presented on an outside stage in the park while most of the workshops take place in the Joslyn Center. Many of the family programs, like building clog dolls and a “musical instrument petting zoo,” are also held in the park, along with jam sessions and a quality craft show. A special concert is held on the Saturday night of the festival at Sycamore School, about one mile from the festival site. The cost of running the festival is covered by many fund raiser concerts, donations from friends of the festival, and festival admission tickets.
The Claremont Spring Folk Festival has a reputation as “the easy goin’, laidback folk festival”, and they want to keep it simple, like something you would have seen back in the sixties - friendly and personable.
[...]
The other two great acts for the Saturday night concert will be true unique Angela Lloyd, nationally renowned storyteller and washboard player, and the Witcher Brothers, one of California’s best bluegrass bands.
Some of the many workshops this year will include: banjo, guitar, washboard, fret-ted and hammered dulcimer, washtub bass, mandolin, fiddle, autoharp, didgeridoo, African drumming and more!"

FolkWorks, September-October 2005 | www.folkworks.org

DOROTHY CHASE’S THREE CHORD SYMPHONY
BY ROSS ALTMAN

One by one they came, Dorothy Chase’s old students, friends and family, to pay homage to the woman who first put a guitar in their hands and taught them how to play it — or a banjo, or a mountain dulcimer. They came to sing for her who had so often sung for them — who put music in their lives so they could make it themselves. They came to thank her, to tell stories about a woman who had welcomed them with open arms when others had closed doors in their faces and hid behind walls of prejudice. They came to say goodbye to a woman with passion in her heart and music in her soul, to remember what she gave them, and to hold each other’s hands in their loss.

Dorothy was 18 years old when she married Charles in 1938, just in time to see his brother Homer join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War and to be grateful that he was one of the lucky ones who — as his name perhaps foretold — came home. Dorothy wore the mantle of this legacy proudly until she died — last June 11 th —at midnight at her home in Claremont, after a seven-year battle with the same rare disease that struck down actor Dudley Moore — progressive supra-nuclear palsy, an irreversible attack on the central nervous system that eventually robs its victims of the capacity for movement and speech.

If you missed the LA Times obituary, Dorothy and Charles built the most amazing shrine to folk music west of the Smithsonian — the Claremont Folk Music Center and Museum. Dorothy also founded the Claremont Folk Song Society and the Claremont Folk Music Festival, now in its 26 th year, which began when some dulcimer players got together one day in Memorial Park in Claremont. Dorothy was a painter as well as a musician, and her paintings filled the Folk Music Center where her students, family and friends gathered for “an open mike memorial” last Thursday.

Dorothy had not been able to speak for two years before she died, but that did not stop others from singing and talking to her. Doug Thompson, her Claremont Folk Festival co-producer until he and his wife Cheryl retired last year after the 25 th annual festival, told me how he came to her home to sing for her just weeks before she passed away, and after an hour of serenading her she squeezed his hand in appreciation. It was the most eloquent thank you he could have received. In public he told a story about how Dorothy rescued the first festival from disaster when they got to the park and discovered all of the sprinklers had been left on and there was no one to turn them off. “Let’s just put the garbage cans over all the sprinkler heads,” she said, and so they did. The show went on!

Her oldest daughter, Sue Chase also sang for her mother, making three trips out here from her home in Virginia during the last three months to do so. Since her mother’s illness she has made a special point of remembering the songs her mom first taught her as a little girl, to sing for her now. Her mother would try to sing along even though it was a struggle for her, and she was always right on cue. And when, because of the illness, her mom could no longer sing at all, she would still be “following every word and every note.” Five years ago, when Dot could still get out a bit, Sue and her and her mom’s old friend Molly Miller dedicated an entire set of songs at the Claremont Folk Festival to her. At the memorial Sue and Molly sang one of Leadbelly’s favorite spirituals, Mary and Martha, and the song’s “charming bells” never sounded sweeter, nor its line about “undying love” more true.

Dorothy’s niece Harriet Aronow sang Go and Dig My Grave from a sing-along sheet she made up of some of her aunt’s favorite songs, including such titles as Amazing Grace, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and The Storms Are On the Ocean, the last of which storyteller Angela Lloyd sang in a heartfelt tribute.

KPFK’s inimitable Uncle Ruthie recalled how Dorothy’s young grand-son Peter Harper designed her first business cards—with such flair that even then she predicted an artistic future for the boy. He became an extraordinary sculptor, and knowing his background it is not hard to see why. His brother Joel is a poet whose book Eyes of a Child is illustrated with some of his grandmother’s paintings and drawings, and her social conscience is reflected in his upcoming children’s book, All the Way to the Ocean.

“Everything she touched turned to art,” Dorothy’s daughter Ellen Chase told me, whose quiet presence graced the entire service. Perhaps her greatest work of art is the Folk Music Center itself, which has evolved into a museum during its 47 years at the heart of the downtown village in “the land of trees and Ph.D.s” Another of Dorothy’s grandsons, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Ben Harper, put it best when he said, “What better way to enter the afterlife than that all of us gather to carry on the music that was Dot’s tradition?

To those of us who looked to Ben to fill her shoes, he proudly and humbly said, “There are no shoes to fill — that door is closed. Dot is the only person I know who is as beautiful as the music she loved.” Building on what he called, “Dot’s three chord symphony,” he added, “The way I hope we can all carry on a piece of her is by trying to embody her beliefs.” That meant, “Peace first,” adding with his quiet elegance, “What’s the use of even living if we are not trying to personify a dream?”

How personally meaningful that dream was became apparent when Clabe Hangan spoke toward the end in the most moving tribute of all: When he and his family moved to the Inland Empire many years ago they found that the Civil Rights Movement had not yet gotten to Claremont, with one exception. The only people in town who would rent to them, who looked not at the color of their skin but at the content of their character, were Charles and Dorothy Chase. And they eventually made it possible for them to own their own home. In other words, they lived their beliefs, without a second thought to the consequences. To hear Clabe talk about what that meant to him, and how their embracing him and his family gave them the chance of a life, made you hear the songs he performed in a different way — “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” told his life story, not just someone’s from two hundred years ago. The love he felt for Dorothy for standing by him during those hard times filled the room, and inspired everyone there.

Clabe also read a letter from folk singers Keith and Rusty McNeill, who paid tribute to Dot in a lovely reminiscence — repeated many times throughout the memorial — of how, way back in 1962, Dot Chase taught Rusty to play guitar, and more ominously gave them the idea they could make a living in folk music. When they decided to strike out on their own in the profession Doc Watson warned you should pursue only “after you have failed at everything else,” the only people who encouraged them to give up security for folk music were Dorothy and Charles and Clabe.

Another of Dot’s former students, Lief Frederick, said that that’s what made Dorothy a great teacher — she did not just teach music, she taught life, and made people believe in themselves as well as the music.

Ben, Joel and Peter’s mother, Ellen (who now manages the Folk Music Center) told me later about what made Dorothy a wonderful mother to a headstrong young girl, “She used to let me skip school a lot and just the two of us would walk down to the sea wall by our house in Weymouth [when they lived in the Boston area] and watch the tide come in.”

When asked how the idea of the Folk Music Center was born, she said it was simply that they had collected so many instruments in the house that there was no longer any place to sit down: “My folks said, ‘let’s start a store.’” Dorothy herself played guitar, banjo, mountain dulcimer, hammered dulcimer and a little bit of piano. Thousands of her students throughout Southern California carry on her musical legacy.

But with Dorothy, the legacy was more than music — it animated her vision of life, which her daughter put into a few simple words when asked what were the most important things she learned from her mother: “First, guitar; second, love and appreciation for all living things; and third, to continue the struggle for peace and justice.”

That struggle was not an easy one to carry on, Ellen pointed out, and left me with a story about how her mom stuck to her guns even when it cost her a place to live: “When we first got to Claremont in 1958 a landlord refused to rent to my mother when we (I just happened to be with her, skipping school again) were looking for a house for the family because they thought she was Mexican. When they found out she was Jewish they said, ‘Oh, Jewish is okay.’ My mother told them to go to hell.”

To her students, to her friends, and to her family, Dorothy Chase was an example and an inspiration, and if there is a Heaven, she is now up there — a damsel with a dulcimer, sitting under a tree playing Shady Grove, and planning next year’s festival.