Page 156 - Carly's education at Sarah Lawrence
"Girls identities were very much about the man you were with," recalls Carly's best friend, Ellen Wise Questel, who went off to Sarah Lawrence , along with Carly. These Riverdale girls were expected to finish college before getting married, and not to have children immediately. However, adds Ellen, "If there was one women's college that got the few women who did not think in a conventional way - who believed in their own talent and expected to be artists in their own right - it was Sarah Lawrence."
"We were all boy crazy," says Lanny Harrison. "We would go down to parties in New York - parties near Columbia, parties in the Village, wherever we heard there were parties - and dance till we dropped, to Johnny Lee Hooker, to Motown and to bluesy folk artists like Jesse Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis. Then we'd climb over the wall and sneak back, long after curfew."
Page 157 - Carly emulates Judy Henske
Carly was one of two folksingers on campus at Sarah Lawrence. She was also beginning to admire Judy Collins, the former pianist who'd switched from piano to guitar and had just released A Maid of Constant Sorrow in the mold of Joan Baez singing Child Ballads, and especially Judy Henske who'd sung with the Whiskey-Hill Singers and opened for Lenny Bruce before becoming a solo act.
Carly heard in Henske's belting voice a hint of her own potential. "Henske was just kind of solidly earthy - amazing." Carly felt, especially on Wade In The Water. Over the next few years, Carly "emulated" her and "copied her songs," which alternated a folk repertoire with the art songs of Jacques Brel.
Page 159 - The Simon Sisters perform
During the summer of 1962, Lucy Simon proposed to Carly that they embrace the idea Uncle Dutch had originally suggested and form a sister singing duo. Lucy worked up a folklike arrangement for the nursery rhyme Wynken, Blynken and Nod by Eugene Field.
With this and a few other self-written songs under their belts, "we said, 'Let's go to Provincetown!' - with one guitar," recalls Lucy. "We had little matching red dresses and matching red heels. We roomed in a rooming house for $50 a week and went around to various bars, calling ourselves the Simon Sisters.
Page 167 - The Simon Sisters record a 2nd album
Wynken, Blyken and Nod was proving to be a surprise hit - quickly climbing to #76 on the Billboard chart. Lucy had talked Carly into dropping out of Sarah Lawrence before the start of her junior year so the Simon Sisters could gain a following through touring.
Carly spent time in France with her boyfriend Nick Delbanco, and met Dionne Warwick on her flight home. Dionne's Walk On By had just become an enormous hit. Carly approached the singer and gave her a tape of one of the songs she'd just composed. It would be the beginning of many such fruitless solicitations.
Carly and Lucy recorded a second Kapp album, Cuddlebug, that featured a song of Carly's, Pale Horse and Rider, which one reviewer called an "Ian-and-Sylvia-like-up-tempo troubadour gallop", along with folk standards like Motherless Child, Turn, Turn, Turn and a French version (Ecoute dans la Vent) of Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind.
