Amy, Dissonance
A short fiction on a missing 1960s folk singer and the slight derangement of ritual.
In this gracious spring and summer
I remember bygone days
Inside my lonely room
I have my secret ways
So go the final lines of Amy Arlington’s most famous song, though they would not be famous for decades. She recorded them in a small radio station in Buffalo, New York in the midst of a melancholy autumn, a week before Halloween, in 1962.
That night, the breeze that came in off Lake Eerie was cool but not yet bitter. It swirled the red and orange leaves along the labyrinthine paths of the University at Buffalo. The grass had died and the harvest moon shone larger than it ever did or would again. It was an autumnal night of strange voices and the stark eeriness of a season that was neither this nor that, neither summer nor winter, neither warm nor cold. The voices of ghosts were in the air.
This was the finest weather for folk music, which is always autumnal and haunted, always sung by ghosts to ghostly melodies. There was an atmosphere of passing things, as the world receded into itself to wait out the long winter.
Buffalo winters are harsh, and when they come, men scurry into warm places and underground passages to escape the ravages of the wind. The studio of WXYL, the official campus radio station, was a warm place that night. There was a sense of domesticity in its cramped surroundings, akin to a cozy attic, with wood-paneled walls, audio equipment stacked in the corners, and piles of records strewn across every horizontal surface.
Derek Finn, the student DJ who hosted the station’s “New Folk Hour,” had cultivated this amber, almost candle-lit ambience. He believed that artists always did their best work in conditions of absolute comfort, and he was right. The artists knew it, and so everyone from Joan Baez to Cisco Houston had darkened his door and regaled his listeners. When these artists became “big” enough, of course, they abandoned Finn for larger and more prestigious venues. He didn’t mind. He was in it to capture the fleeting moment. That was enough for him.
It was not difficult to satisfy Finn and his audience, because they were members of perhaps the first generation in history to grow up without drama. They longed for the frisson of life. They wanted the “real thing,” which could not be bought or sold, but only grasped at for a split-second. For them, this was often the sound of steel strings as they struck and vibrated on varnished wood. The sound was just natural and unaffected enough to rouse a certain sensation, which was all they were after. And that, it must be said, is not so much to ask.
This generation wanted some small taste of the horrors of life, the horrors their parents and grandparents had known in the Depression and then the war. They felt they had, by a confluence of history, missed some great ceremony, an initiation undergone by every other generation of man. They did not want the full measure, as was proven later in the decade when war came again, and millions refused to undergo the blood rite of the nation. But on that autumn night in Buffalo, it was 1962, and President Kennedy was still alive. The assassination that so many looked to as the moment “when it all went wrong” was still a year away, and everything was all innocence, or at least it seemed to be.
This was an illusion. The reality was that no one was innocent, not even then, because it is a very rare thing to be innocent. The civil rights marches were underway down south, and racial tensions, which would soon explode, were already at work in the north. A crisis that had almost resulted in the nuclear incineration of the world had passed just a few months before. American troops were stationed around the world and “advisors” crawled through the jungles of Vietnam. The usual depredations of life continued, as they always had: Poverty, child abuse, rape, alcoholism, murder for reasons passionate and pecuniary, petty crime in various forms, and all the minor cruelties and slights human beings, by nature, inflict on each other.
In the face of all this, some of the young turned to folk music not so much as a means of activism and dissent, but because it gave them comfort. Folk was the music of the past. It sang of things that happened long before the age of steam, electricity, oil, and nuclear bombs. In a murder ballad, you could kill one man (or woman), but not millions. To wipe all life from the crust of the Earth was beyond the capacity of the ancients. When they spoke of it, it was in fervent warnings of the Day of the Lord and the Last Judgment, to be accomplished by God alone. But now men could accomplish it, whether by gas chamber or controlled implosion. The young were bruised and buffeted by the mere fact that Auschwitz and Hiroshima had happened. The ancient ways, the old traditions, the obscure rituals, were a blanket that kept them warm against the bitter cold of nuclear winter.
This did not mean any particular embrace of the mores of the past. The young had not turned into the straitlaced, buttoned-up, modest, churchgoing, small town, middle-class Americans of old. Quite the opposite. They rejected it all, and folk music was perfect for this disillusionment. It was, after all, the music of the folk (stripped of the “volkish” connotations of the fascist and the Nazi), which meant the music of “the people.” It was the cry of the proletariat beset by bourgeoise oppression. It meant blue jeans, work shirts, and the drawl of the Midwestern dirt farmer and the southern poor white, the black steel driver and the ghostly peasant maiden. Folk music gave the young a return to the past without the tyrannies of the past.
Contrary to popular cliché, Amy Arlington had not “come a long way” to that tiny studio. She was born and grew up a four-hour drive away in a suburb of Syracuse, New York, the daughter of a bank manager and a homemaker, and she and her one sibling—a sister named Melinda—appear to have had a more or less normal childhood.
What set Amy apart, besides her shock of platinum blonde hair and freckled cheeks, was a melancholy disposition. That is, Amy often seemed sad for no apparent reason at all. Nonetheless, children are given to strange and unpredictable heights of emotion, and what would be madness in an adult is considered normal in a child. And Amy was not always sad. It was a mood that struck her from time to time, and then it passed. It occurred most often on rainy days and moonless nights, when she would sometimes be found staring at the gray or jet-black sky from her bedroom window, as if in search of a break in the clouds or the luminous orb enshadowed by the Earth.
Some nights, when a storm rain fell, she was found sleepwalking in the grounds of a nearby park. When awakened, she had no memory of how she got there or why she had ventured out on such an inclement evening. Once, she caught a chill in her wanderings and lay in a high fever for five days, which terrified her parents Arthur and Elizabeth. After she recovered, they considered whether to restrain her by tying her hands to the bed while she slept, but decided against it.
There were one or two further incidents, and then they ceased, never to recur. Her parents were satisfied that she had, as they had hoped, “grown out of it.” But no one ever grows out of anything. The origins of Amy’s melancholia remain unknown, but they were strong and permanent. They were patient, they waited, they were not in a hurry, and Amy would never quite elude or outrun them, whatever form they might take at any given moment. Indeed, it is not clear that she ever attempted to do so, though one imagines that she must have, because people do not disappear unless they are running from something.
Amy acquired her first guitar at the age of 13, just as adolescence, with all its upheavals, took hold. It is not a coincidence that this is a common age for musicians to be born. It was 1953, and the guitar was not yet the iconic object that it would later become. While it was already identified in some circles with beatniks and communists, this was a stigma confined to the few. The instrument was seen by the public at large as, at worst, benign; in particular when compared to, say, the saxophone, which in the public mind was synonymous with heroin-addled jazzmen
Amy received the guitar, as was common among suburbanites, at Christmas. It was unsolicited, and in all likelihood her parents gave it to her in hope that it would soothe the savage beast that lurked somewhere in the depths of Amy’s subconscious. It was the cheapest and most portable instrument available, and thus—for the practical-minded bourgeoisie—the perfect choice. One could soothe the beast on the cheap, which was irresistible to a banker and his dutiful spouse. The guitar itself was a gut-string acoustic of the type favored by classical musicians, and it came with an instruction book that explained rudimentary chords and scales, as well as how to play “Hot Cross Buns” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Amy does not appear to have spent much time on these exercises, but concentrated instead on songs taught to her after class by her high school music teacher. These songs, collated from forgotten minstrel shows, popular songbooks of the fin de siècle, and the occasional gospel or work song, were the first hints of the folk tradition she would encounter—“Wreck of the Titanic,” “The Legend of John Henry,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Peace in the Valley,” “Sidewalks of New York,” “Aint Gonna Study War No More,” and so on. There was even the odd “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain” and “Home on the Range.”
For Amy, the ignition of what would become her formidable talent was “Henry Lee.” This murder ballad captivated Amy, and she would sing it for the rest of what is known of her life. Born in England some 400 years ago, the song is an incongruous one for a teenage girl to fall in love with, because it is above all a sinister tale, in which a maid murders her lover and disposes of his body in a well, all of it watched by a little bird who “lights down” on the dead man’s shoulder.
This surreal touch of the avian transforms an otherwise typical—if elegant—murder ballad into something eerie and eldritch, with a sense of the bird as a psychopomp of death possessed of a soul of its own, in particular when it goes so far as to speak. It admonishes the girl that a woman who would murder “her own heart’s love” would not hesitate to “kill a little bird like me.” The bird’s impulse is decidedly liminal. It hints at a place between the human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, natural and supernatural, and above all guilt and innocence.
It may have been this uncanny ambivalence that attracted Amy to the song. She was herself in a liminal moment. She was caught between girl and woman, innocent of the things of the world yet already capable of “sin” as then construed. She was the little bird and the maid whose virginal purity betrays a ferocious capacity for violence. And perhaps she was Henry Lee as well, the heedless rake who pursues his own pleasures at mortal cost and is, in the end, mourned only by a small frightened animal. It may be that Amy was all the characters in this bizarre little song, so venerable and archaic yet alive in its terror. It made her aware of the potential horrors of life, even if they happened to other people in other places.
When Amy was 15, however, it happened to her. In early October 1955, Arthur was driving home after a stressful day at work when he suffered a massive heart attack, which killed him before he careened off the road and struck a tree at 60 miles per hour. Seatbelts were unknown at the time, and the impact sent him through the windshield. He landed 30 feet away with a crushed skull. The pronunciation of death at the scene was at best a formality. Nothing that had taken place was survivable.
We do not know Amy’s precise reaction to Arthur’s sudden death. It seems probable that, for the most part, it was no different than that of any other teenage girl, except for the fact that she began to write songs.
It is not quite possible today to grasp how unusual this was, even for a precocious child with considerable musical talent. It was not just the fact that Amy was 15, but that almost no one at the time wrote songs, and they did not, as Amy did, write them in the folk idiom. Songwriting then was the domain of professional scribes, men and a few women who churned out pop hits as a job of work. Housed in such mammoth industrial facilities as New York’s Brill Building, they sat at their pianos from nine to five every day, owned and operated by the record and publishing companies along with a handful of gangsters who kept a low profile. These scribes were no less capable of greatness than a 15-year-old girl mourning in her bedroom, but they were a closed guild, and it was not within their or anyone else’s comprehension that they might be challenged.
For different reasons, this was also true of the nascent folk revival. Not only did the day’s prominent performers make little or no attempt to challenge the songwriting establishment, it was considered unthinkable and even verboten to do so. The folk movement of the time was dedicated to preservationism, traditionalism, and purism. Its goal was to become a kind of moveable exhibit, a museum of the other artistry of other times, places, and people. The movement preferred its songs to have no author at all, except for the strange epithet “traditional.” It wanted the music to have sprung fully-formed from the collective unconscious of the proletariat—workers, farmers, Dust Bowl nomads, railroad gangs, condemned prisoners, unhappy maids, and so on.
Folk music, of course, always had songwriters of one kind or another. It had no choice. The existence of Woody Guthrie alone was proof positive that, contrary to popular belief, transcendent genius is not unusual, and most of what seems to be the collective accretions of centuries was, in all likelihood, the work of a single, albeit forgotten man. The collective unconscious of the proletariat was a thing of singular poverty, and the fact that the authors of the great works remained unnamed and unremembered in no way vitiated their accomplishments. The folk revival may not have wanted to believe that it stood on the shoulders of giants rather than the masses, but it did.
Amy’s first efforts were not quite those of a giant. We do not know when she first began to compose, but we have her notebooks from early June 1956 to late February 1958, and the first rough sketches of songs appear to date from some six months after her father’s death. Amy’s first completed composition, “The Lonesome Maid,” dates from August 1956 and is modeled on “Henry Lee.” For the most part, like many folk songs, even the most famous and beloved, it is a patchwork of lines from other songs. Nonetheless, there is a keen naiveté to the lyrics that cannot be denied, and the notebook’s scratchy notations show several uses of relative minor chords that mark the song as a small but noticeable departure from its model. Moreover, amidst the familiar phrases like “I am a lonesome maid, the truth to you I’ll tell,” there are mysterious anomalies that point to a greater and more personal significance.
The song tells the well-worn tale of the “lonesome maid,” who is besotted with a “rambling man” who “came round in spring” while she wore “my apron low.” Now, however, her apron “is over my chin,” which indicates that she is with child by the aforementioned rake, who “has not come round again.” This is classic, even cliched stuff. But then there is the strange line “by a tree on a lonely road, his body lies,” which is found in no known folk song. It changes, moreover, the apparent meaning of the song, in that the lonesome maid has not been abandoned by the rambling man. Rather, the rambling man has met an unfortunate end—perhaps on his way to see her—that precludes any possibility of his return.
Unlike its predecessors, then, the song is not about the wickedness of an indifferent rake, but rather a tragic tale of the cruelties of fate. The rambling man will never know he has a child, and the lonesome maid will never know that he wished to return but by malicious chance was unable. None of this, the song appears to say, is anybody’s fault. It just happened.
This is heady enough for a girl who was not yet 16, but it contains even greater depths, because there is no doubt as to the identity of the deceased rambling man. Whose body had lain by a tree on a lonely road? Who was struck down by malicious chance and indifferent fate? The dead man can only be Arthur himself. The lonesome maid great with child can only be the sad little girl, pregnant with as yet unrealized creative potential, who for no good reason has lost the one man who, thus far, she has ever loved. Amy’s father, like the rambling man, wandered too far afield and the furies struck him down.
The lyrics to several other songs are extant in Amy’s notebooks, such as “The Wind Through the Willows” and “The Bard of Tremayn,” but they are all mere collages and lack the spontaneous anomalies that so distinguish “The Lonesome Maid.” Nonetheless, they reinforce the impression that here, in protean form, is a potentially great talent. Despite her young age, Amy had grasped if not mastered the folk idiom, and was even then capable of that slight derangement of tradition that is the source of artistic originality.
It is probable that Amy continued to write songs throughout her high school years, but we have nothing but fragments of lyrics. There are occasional lines of stark beauty, such as “My dream goes wandering o’er a gray flaxen field,” and at least one apparent reference to T.S. Eliot—“he ate the prickly pears of cactus land”—in the midst of a pastiche of the cowboy song, but they are otherwise undistinguished. It is not clear if she even attempted to set them to music.
There is little evidence that she performed very often. However, in her high school yearbook, she is shown at a senior year talent show with her guitar. It is a remarkable photograph, in which Amy wears a long white dress and cradles her guitar, which hangs from a strap around her neck, like a child. Her eyes are closed and her mouth open as if in the midst of an intense, resonant note, the small gap between her two front teeth plainly visible. Her cheeks are plump and cherubic, and the overall impression is that of a child grown old or an old woman still a child. The text below states that the songs performed were “Greensleeves” and, of course, “Henry Lee.” In public, it appears, Amy was still confined to the traditional folk songbook.
This is the only known example of Amy in performance during this time, and there is no recording of it. For the most part, it seems, she played and sang for herself, perhaps for the pleasure of it, perhaps in search of some form of therapeutic catharsis—we do not know.
In all likelihood, the particular quality most often associated with Amy, that of intimacy, was created in that solitude, perhaps over long hours deep into the night. She became used to that loneliness, and future audiences would often say that, when she performed, Amy appeared to “go away.” It was as if the audience had ceased to exist for her, and she was quite alone, without the hardship and strife that comes from the presence of other people. It is possible that this strange, at times uncanny quality was born in the small bedroom of Amy’s suburban home in those few years that followed Arthur’s death.
In 1959, Amy graduated from high school and decamped from Syracuse to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She had been accepted on an almost full scholarship by Radcliffe College, then the foremost women’s college in the United States, and intended to study child psychology—a choice of subject vast in its implications. In the end, it proved a road not taken, but it did place her in close proximity to the other world she was soon to enter.
Amy’s first few months at Radcliffe were undistinguished, but soon after, she stopped going to classes and disappeared into the folk scene centered around Harvard Square and especially the Club Passim. How she first entered the scene is not known, but it was almost certainly at an open mic night, when more or less anyone can play anything they want.
As was the custom of the time and indeed now, Amy was first noticed for her appearance, in particular her shock of gleaming blonde hair. But she soon became known—by those in the know—as an artist one might call “unique” or, less generously, an “acquired taste.” Even at this early stage, Amy had developed an unusual style. She tended to fingerpick her guitar, which created a quieter sound than that of a plectrum, and sang in a soft voice pitched lower than the typical female soprano, at times no louder than a whisper.
What shocked observers, however, was Amy’s calculated disrespect for traditional melodies, which she would alter or, to her detractors, “mangle” into bizarre variations that disturbed the ears of purists. She might sing “This Land Is Your Land,” but it would sound nothing like the venerated original. A few considered her style closer to jazz than folk, and sometimes compared her to Billie Holliday.
It was on those tiny stages in the corners of coffee houses and small clubs filled with smoke and reeking of beer and coffee that Amy developed her final and now legendary arrangement of “Henry Lee.” She would begin it sotto voce, and weave the ancient melody line into labyrinthine distortions. When she struck the refrain “la da da da da, la da da da dee,” her voice would rise into a full alto declaration that became a piercing wail and then dissolved back into a whisper with the words “a little bird lit down on Henry Lee.”
No one who heard it ever forgot it, or indeed heard it the same way twice. Each of Amy’s performances of the song contained deviations both major and minor, and it was often with excitement that patrons waited to hear the song for the fifth or sixth time. They wanted to know what wondrous perversion might take place this time.
Amy, in other words, had moved into the unknown. The folk singers of her time had their styles—whether anachronistic, like Dave van Ronk and Pete Seeger, or modulated anew, like Joan Baez’s operatic readings—but they were not discursive, twisted, or indifferent to the source material. It was for this reason, perhaps, that Amy often perplexed and sometimes offended the mainstays of the scene, who were almost all purists by disposition and ideology. There were often boos when she swung off the traditional melody into the trauma of the new, and some went so far as to dismiss her style as, at best, inspired incompetence. Amy sang the classics that way, they said, because she couldn’t sing them the right way.
This might have been true, though not quite in the way they thought. Something in Amy was not only unwilling but unable to be content with mere repetition. She required something more hazardous but also more courageous. Of course, she could have sung in a conventional manner on technical grounds, but on moral grounds, it may have been impossible for her.
It seems to have been in early 1960, just before Amy departed Radcliffe and Cambridge for good, that she began to sing her own songs on stage. She did so, one might say, in secret. She never announced that a song was hers, and left the audience to assume it was a traditional with which they were unfamiliar. Several witnesses have testified that they heard her sing “The Lonesome Maid” on more than one occasion, and that “The Wind Through the Willows” and another, otherwise unknown song that contained the line “I have gone roaming through shrubland deserts”—again, echoes of T.S. Eliot—were also performed.
Amy emerged in full as a songwriter, however, when she took her leave. In hindsight, the move seems inevitable, even imperative, but it could not have seemed so at the time. For a girl to go to college at all in that time was a rarity. For a girl to leave college voluntarily and not under the duress of marriage or unwanted pregnancy was all but unthinkable, and must have come at immense personal cost.
Moreover, when she abandoned her education, Amy not only placed her own future in jeopardy, but also abandoned her father’s great dream, progressive for its time, that his daughter might become an educated, professional woman. There was slim chance that his dream could be realized even with a college education, but without one, it would be impossible.
It is not clear why the betrayal of the dreams and wishes of the dead seems so much worse to us than those of the living. It is the living, after all, who know they have been betrayed, and can feel the pain of it. The dead are spared all of that, and yet we place their suffering—which cannot exist—above our own. Perhaps it is because, to us, the dead are like infants and dumb beasts, helpless and innocent, and thus to betray them is the greater evil.
But Amy also betrayed the living. In particular, her decision led to a rift with her mother that was never repaired. After she left Radcliffe, Amy often referred to herself as an orphan, and there is no evidence that she and her mother ever spoke again, though Amy may have maintained sporadic contact with her sister.
The ultimate reason for Amy’s departure, and why she sacrificed so much for it, was that a world waited for her elsewhere. In Cambridge folk circles, Amy could not help but hear about the great Mecca of Greenwich Village. In Manhattan, on streets with names like Bleeker and MacDougal, in the confines of certain islands of bohemia, the homeland of the folk revival waited for her. If Amy was to become Amy, it would have to be in New York City. She dropped out of Radcliffe and a week later hitchhiked her way to Manhattan with her guitar and a single suitcase.
At first, she stayed with friends from the Cambridge folk scene, but soon moved into a small apartment on West 3rd Street with a nursing student and an ambitious poet. By this time, she had already begun to appear at open mic nights in clubs like Gerdes Folk City, the Bitter End, and the Café Wha!. She survived by busking in the subways and whittling away at her small inheritance.
Needless to say, Amy’s initial appearances were not very profitable, because audiences and fellow musicians reacted in much the same way as those in Cambridge—that is to say, they were mystified and sometimes outright offended. Just as it had in the sticks, Amy’s unusual style was, at first, incomprehensible to the city sophisticates, and the true purists—who were the most frequent attendees on any given night—hated it. No one knew quite what to do with Amy.
There was a further complication: Amy often sang songs no one had ever heard before. Her own compositions unnerved the audience. Because now, there was not just the issue of Amy’s uncommon style. Here were other songs, with other words and other music. Some were in the folk idiom, but others sounded like something else, though no one could quite describe what it was.
One of them, for example, later titled “Judgment,” consisted of nothing but a wordless drone over a descending minor scale. Another, called “Halfway House,” contained the line “Your ego won’t let you dance.” The word “ego”—to the best of anyone’s knowledge—had never appeared in a single folk song in history. “Rapturous” contained a series of jazz chords far too complex for an audience that rarely encountered anything but simple major and minor triads.
The audience’s ambivalence was the result of the particular and peculiar nature of the folk movement itself. It was very strange, in fact, that it was referred to as “folk” at all. The folk movement was not a movement and was not “folk”—if by “folk” one means the vernacular music preferred by the majority of people in any given society or culture. In reality, the folk movement was little more than a few hundred people in New York and a handful of other cities, and was an archival endeavor. It collected, codified, and recorded for posterity those songs that might have once been popular, but were no longer. “Henry Lee,” to name Amy’s favorite, had not been widely known or sung for several hundred years. The folk movement was much closer to an archeological expedition than an artistic endeavor.
This handicapped Amy, but it would not have condemned her to obscurity but for the fact that she was ahead of her time. Bob Dylan would not appear on the scene for another two years, and for the moment, none of its leading lights felt the need to sing their own songs—let alone songs that stepped outside the folk idiom.
Some even had political objections to original material. The personal tone of Amy’s songs, which were contemplative and self-reflective, struck them as expressions of pure narcissism, destructive bourgeoise individualism, and a dereliction of the folk movement’s responsibility to represent and liberate the masses. To sing about yourself, the folk militants thought, was a betrayal of the revolution.
There were also elements, it must be said, of prejudice involved. Amy’s introspection was seen by some as an expression of the feminine vices of over-emotionalism and self-absorption. The exploration of the self through song was seen as akin to an obsession with shoes or plucking one’s eyelashes. There were occasional snide remarks like, “Oh, the girl’s about to sing,” that were never made about Joan Baez or Odetta.
Whatever the reasons, the result was that Amy remained something of an outsider on the scene. Beyond a few friends, none of whom could be described as “close,” Amy formed no serious bonds with fellow musicians and went uninvited to the various social occasions that were as much a part of the scene as the actual music. Perhaps Amy preferred it that way. She was, after all, an artist to the tips of her fingers, and her chief concern was the perfection of her skills, not social advancement. Still, this mattered little, because for all its pretensions of integrity and authenticity, the folk scene had as much respect for such principles as any other social milieu, which is to say, very little.
Less dignified was the fact that Amy supplied almost no material for gossip, which as in all subcultures was the coin of the realm. Everyone had their loves, hatreds, rivalries, and resentments. Moreover, it was the dawn of the ‘60s, and everybody was fucking or trying to fuck everybody else more or less all the time. This, of course, was a major topic of conversation. But Amy took no part in this. She never appeared to have a lover, and those few who tried were met with polite but firm rejection. Amy seemed to love nobody and hate nobody, and while there were some who resented her aloofness, she had no passionate rivals or enemies, at least on a social level. She was just there, an ever-present anomaly.
In the end, it took someone from outside the scene to recognize her talent in full. Gregg Mankiewicz, a jazz critic for the Village Voice, tended not to go to folk clubs, but on one of the nights he did, he saw Amy perform third at an open mic night. He was instantly taken by the discursive, improvisatory approach she took to melody, which though it did not employ traditional jazz melodies, seemed to partake of the spirit of jazz, which held that every performance must be different, and no song was to be like itself on any given night.
He also grasped that, in Amy, a certain originality was at work. He was not well-versed enough in the folk idiom to know that most of Amy’s repertoire was self-authored, but he did know that he had never heard folk music that sounded like this, and even the few songs he did recognize, which included a dirge-like performance of “Henry Lee,” were all but unrecognizable.
Fascinated, Mankiewicz tried to speak with Amy after her set, but she was nowhere to be found. The manager told him she had left by the back door, as she often did. When Mankiewicz plied him for further information, the manager had none to give, except that her name was Amy Arlington.
Thus frustrated, Mankiewicz repaired back to his apartment, where on his ragged portable typewriter, he banged out a review—in fact, more of an extended feuilleton—in which he contemplated what he had just witnessed and what it all meant. “I felt,” he wrote, in the grip of strong emotion, “as if I saw, in this strange and dissonant creature, the future of both jazz and folk. Here was a woman who has forged for herself a completely untrodden path that, by pure coincidence, has melded together these two great American musical traditions, without which American music itself could not exist. If that music has a future despite the crush of the ultra-capitalist pop industry, and I believe it does—that it must—then it may sound very much like Amy Arlington.”
Mankiewicz finished his article at 5 am. He did not bother to sleep, and delivered the manuscript to the Voice’s offices an hour later. It ran in the next day’s edition, and was read by almost no one. On the folk scene, it appeared to have no effect whatsoever, even though most of its denizens were avid readers of the Voice. Mankiewicz’s prophecy fell on deaf ears. Even Amy herself made no attempt to thank Mankiewicz or even contact him. It is quite possible that, if she knew the article existed at all, she never read it.
Despite Mankiewicz’s ineffectual effort, however, a small group, a clique, or perhaps even something like a cult began to gather around Amy. The habitués of the various clubs and coffee shops began to notice that, when Amy played, the same people appeared. They were a motley assortment: Poseurs in proletarian work shirts, well-dressed suit-and-tie chain-smokers who looked like jazz fans far from their usual haunts like the Village Vanguard, young women with long blonde and chestnut locks that fell flat down their shoulders and backs, parted just enough to give their eyes room to see the stage, and a few very young beatniks in wrinkled and unkempt corduroy.
Charlie Rothschild, the booking agent of Gerdes and one of the few who had read Mankiewicz’s article—with great skepticism—began to sense that Amy might have an audience. A small audience, but just large enough to justify the attention of the higher-ups of the folk world. He contacted Barry Heckman, editor of the folk periodical Rise Up Singing!, and recommended he attend one of Amy’s performances. Perhaps Heckman might even want to publish one or two of her original songs, or make some brief generous comments about her in the next issue. “I think,” he told Heckman, “that this girl’s got something… maybe.”
Heckman agreed, and a few weeks later attended a show at Gerdes. Amy was the opening act, and from the first moment she stepped on stage, Heckman was distressed. In fact, he was horrified. First, he saw Amy, in his opinion, massacre “Strange Fruit.” She turned it, he felt, from the strident protest song he loved into a quiet wail that almost forewent the pentatonic. He was also offended by her recitation of “Henry Lee,” which, he felt, drained the ancient balled of all its aged dignity.
As for Amy’s original songs, he was mystified by lines like, “In my closet hang the remains of Marilyn Monroe,” “my hands turn cold at the touch of sodden flesh,” “long untold are a woman’s woes over morning coffee and sterile weeds,” and in particular, “sing softly, beloved one, with shattered lips and a frozen sun.” He could make neither head nor tail of any of it. But he was certain of one thing: This was not folk music. It was a blasphemy of folk music. When Amy began her atonal medley of “Drill, Ye Tarriers” and “The Legend of John Henry,” he stormed out.
Heckman was not just an opinionated man, but an inveterate gossip. When he hated something, he made sure everyone knew about it whether they liked it or not. Within days, it was known throughout the folk scene—which was as insular and vicious as any small-town high school—that Amy Arlington was not only a bad folk singer, but also a heretic. She had betrayed the ancient tradition in the name of ego, irreverence, and bourgeois narcissism. Her sympathies might well lie with the great enemy, which was the individual and individualism. Amy Arlington seemed to want to be an original, to be herself, and to do so, she had sullied what they all held most dear. She might even be after that worst of all things: Fame and fortune. The hideous stardom that was fit only for the Bobby Darins and Doris Days of the world.
The consequences were swift and brutal: The bookings dried up, and it was made clear by way of silent hostility that Amy was no longer welcome at the open mic nights as a performer or a patron. A few of Amy’s small group of admirers inquired after her, but they were small in number, and considered misfits and outsiders anyway, so their quiet entreaties fell on deaf ears. Thanks to Heckman, Amy’s career was over before it started.
The aforementioned Derek Finn, however, did not know this. Finn was, for the most part, confined to Buffalo, but his friend Eric Price lived in New York City, and was one of Amy’s small but dedicated circle of admirers. He sought out Amy wherever he could find her, clad in his black beatnik attire augmented by a top hat. Finn visited Price in mid-October 1962, saw Amy perform at Gerdes—the same performance that sent Heckman into paroxysms of rage—and was smitten.
After the show, he introduced himself to her and invited her to appear on his WXYL “New Folk Hour.” He even went so far as to offer her a ride to Buffalo and, of course, a return trip back to the city. This was generous, given that the drive would take a total of six hours each way. Amy, in an unusual move, agreed. That weekend, even as Heckman’s poison spread through the folk scene, she and Finn departed for the deep north.
What Finn discovered on the long drive to Buffalo was that Amy was much more talkative than he imagined, since on stage she often seemed ethereal and disconnected from things. He expected gnomic, philosophical asides from her, but nothing of the sort came.
She spoke of small things: A stray cat she had befriended on the steps of her building. The difficulties of moving into her own apartment, as she had just done. The general expense of life in New York City. That she had long wanted to read Middlemarch, but had been defeated after 50 pages, and the truth was she didn’t much like long books. Her frustration that you could not see the stars in Manhattan. A collection of dolls she acquired from local thrift stores. Her affection for old things in general. That she thought she might move to the West Coast, where the climate was warmer. That she did not like New York City winters, because you couldn’t enjoy the snow, which turned black in short order due to the municipal filth. That she would own a cat if she could afford it and had room for it, which she didn’t. That her favorite color was royal purple. That she didn’t have a favorite food, and in fact didn’t much care for eating, but supposed you had to do it.
When Finn tried to press her about music, she demurred. She did say her favorite singer was Frank Sinatra, which might have been true, that she had no favorite song, and that she often thought she should dispense with lyrics altogether and embark on long, improvised experiments in pure tone and timbre, but then, the audience wouldn’t like that. They would see it as self-indulgent, and any artist had to think of the audience. Any of them who said otherwise were lying. When Finn tried to press her about her unusual style, she said nothing more than “I sing them like I hear them.”
It was many months later, when he thought back over their conversation, that Finn realized there had been one consistent theme: Amy had never spoken about the past. Not a single word. Asked where she came from, she just said “around.” When queried about her family, she shrugged and said nothing. After that, she had steered the conversation toward the present alone, with not a mention of her previous self or her future ambitions beyond the most obscure banalities. It was as if she wanted Finn to believe she had always been like this.
By the time they reached Buffalo, night had fallen, and the two went straight to the University at Buffalo campus and WXYL studios. Amy appeared comfortable enough as Finn, who was as skilled a sound engineer as he was a DJ, set up two microphones—one for her guitar and one for vocals—and the two of them talked about what would be played. In perhaps her only reference to her singular style, she said both traditional and original songs would be included, but “you won’t be able to tell the difference.”
At 10 pm, the on-air light clicked on, and Finn commenced a brief introduction. He emphasized the unusual, idiosyncratic quality of Amy’s music and, in a small faux pas, told Amy, “I guess not a lot of people like you, but the ones who do really like you.” Amy did not appear to be bothered by this, and reacted with a soft laugh. Already discomfited, and afraid to say any more, Finn handed the show over to Amy without further comment.
Amy began with “Drill Ye Tarriers,” which she changed from a minor-key march to a near-ballad of the workingman’s misery. She segued without a pause (the songs were in the same key) to her own “Flaxen Man” with its repeated invocations of a world of infinite transience. She followed with “Firestorm,” an eerie and calm original about a young girl who witnesses an inferno in a far-off cornfield. The Civil War ballad “Two Soldiers” kept its ballad form, but was marked by several dissonant chords and a ululating vocal more akin to Middle Eastern music than Western harmonics. Her “Sir Jason” contained vague images of a perpetual wanderlust and “Your Selfish Mind” belied its simple title with lyrics like “you lit a cigarette with half of last year’s Bible” and “if ever I remember the scars on your inner thigh,” one of her few erotic references. In a surprise twist, she dragged “The Lonesome Maid,” which she had not played since her Cambridge days, out of the closet, and followed it with her peon to nature, “The Golden Forest of Night.” She then gave her perennial rendition of “Henry Lee” in tones that were gentle and ethereal even for her.
Her final song, however, would cement the night forever into the minds of her few but dedicated followers. “Tygers” was a 12-minute ballad that incorporated elements of Blake’s poem but then drifted away into its own phantasmagoric imagery, such as “invisible boxes,” “hidden rat’s eyes,” “movies played to the deaf and the blind,” and “the lost and gone river of red and hollow lights.” But in its lengthy penultimate verse, most of which did not rhyme, was her most explicit reference to her childhood loss: “My old man should have been home last night/He walked away under old street lights/To nevermore and neverland/With love in his heart and nothing on his mind/Through shattered glass and broken hearts.” The verses were punctuated by the chorus, “I’ve been dreaming of Tygers in the jungle black/Oh, forget me not my sweet one/My precious one/Long, long gone and far away.”
As the last chord faded, there was, for a brief moment, the dreaded “dead air” as Finn composed himself. When he finally spoke, it was clear from his voice that there were tears in his eyes. He had, he later said, never been so moved in his life. Then he leaned close to the mic and said in a soft voice, “Amy Arlington, ladies and gentlemen. Good night and sweet dreams.” This final phrase, which captured this stark, windswept autumn night in all its perfection, sent listeners off into a peaceful sleep as the world turned cold. It never left the minds of anyone who heard it, and it remained the coda of the performance when, many years and a lifetime later, it was released as “Amy Arlington: Good Night and Sweet Dreams.”
It was almost midnight, far too late for the long drive back to the city. The ‘60s was a time when people felt safe enough to “wing it,” so no plans had been made for Amy’s accommodations. Women were not allowed in the men’s dormitories—the great revolutions, sexual and otherwise, were yet to occur—but it was a custom often observed in the breach. So, Finn offered Amy his own bed, with himself on the floor, available to protect her from any invader. She agreed, and they walked the 10 minutes to the dormitories in a chilly breeze that swirled the dead leaves around their feet. A great harvest moon, orange and pink, hung in the sky above them, and the scent of burning wood laced the edges of the wind. When they arrived at the dorm, Finn took a spare blanket and pillow and stretched his long legs out on the floor, while Amy clambered into the top bunk above Finn’s roommate—who appeared to be in a drunken stupor. Just as he drifted off to sleep, Finn realized she had taken her guitar to bed with her.
They both slept late the next morning, and Finn took Amy to a local diner—what was, and may still, be called a “greasy spoon”—for lunch. They talked of small and unimportant things, and when Finn nervously breached the subject of the previous night’s performance, he was only able to get out the word “amazing” before she thanked him and changed the subject. What it had all meant to him would go unsaid.
At around 1 pm, they embarked on the return trip to Manhattan. Finn hoped to say more, something of significance, but Amy fell asleep 10 minutes into the drive and did not awake until they were halfway through the Holland Tunnel. Finn realized that it was very possible she had not slept the entire night before.
He dropped her off on Bleeker Street and asked for her phone number in order to book a return engagement. She shrugged and said, “You know where to find me.” Then she waved and walked away towards 6th Avenue. As he turned the car around, Finn caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror as she strode past MacDougal Street. Her guitar case hung from her right hand as a streetlight turned on and illuminated her blonde hair in the gathering dusk. Finn stared at the apparition for a brief moment. Then he drove away. This, so far as is known, was the last time anyone ever saw Amy Arlington, alive or dead.
It took some time for Amy’s absence to be noticed. She had always been somewhat elusive, and the folk scene was a nomadic one. Those few who thought about it at all thought that since Heckman’s denunciation, she had found it impossible to “show her face” at the clubs. Others believed that, disillusioned with New York, she had gone back to Cambridge, or perhaps decamped for the West Coast, where the seeds of the hippie movement were already sown. Still others thought she had quit, dropped out, and decided to make a life in the “straight” world, perhaps as a bourgeoise housewife. Even Amy’s tiny group of enthusiasts, despite their disappointment, accepted her absence as a matter of course. The turnover on the scene, after all, was high.
Amy’s landlord, however, was perturbed when the rent did not arrive on time, and made several attempts to contact his tenant. When these came to naught, he marched down to the building on 6th Avenue and searched the apartment. He found nothing untoward. After two months, he initiated eviction proceedings, which were in any case moot, because Amy was not there to respond to the summons. In the end, he tore up the lease, put Amy’s belongings on the street, and rented the place to someone else. The truth was, Amy had built herself a world that excluded almost all others, so no one noticed when she was gone.
Six months after he had hosted Amy on WXYL, Finn came to the city in hopes that she would agree to perform again. His friends on the folk scene were not much help, but he managed to acquire her address, only to be faced with the new tenant—a budding heroin addict who did not much like being disturbed. He sent Finn to Amy’s now-former landlord, who was even more angry than the addict, screaming about the back rent he was owed.
Thus, Finn arrived at a dead end. He could have accepted this and headed back north, but, naïve as he was, the thought that he would not hear that sound again bothered him enough to keep him on the trail. He wanted to see and hear Amy, and if she had, God forbid, put down her instrument for good, he wanted to know it for sure, and perhaps even to know why.
There was one slender thread to pull on. Amy had told him almost nothing about her past, but she had mentioned her sojourn on the Cambridge folk scene, which Finn knew meant the Club Passim. When he returned to Buffalo the next day, he called the club and asked for the booking agent. Rebuffed twice, he at last managed to speak to the man three days later. The agent remembered Amy, though with little generosity—Finn lamented the discovery of yet another purist—but did give him the invaluable information that Amy was from upstate New York and had attended Radcliffe College. “A real woman of the people,” the agent said scornfully, at which Finn summarily hung up on him.
Within seconds, Finn was on the phone with the Radcliffe registrar’s office. He asked whether they had an Amy Arlington on file and hoped against hope that “Amy Arlington” was not a stage name. He felt the hair on his arms rise when they confirmed that they did. He asked if they had an address or telephone number, and added that it was a matter of great importance. It was a more innocent time, and they gave him both.
Amy’s sister Melinda answered the phone, which was fortuitous, as her mother would have refused to speak to anyone about Amy at all. Melinda had no suspicions of her mysterious caller, but she also had no information for him, as neither she nor any of the rest of the family had seen Amy since she dropped out of Radcliffe.
When Melinda was told that no one had seen Amy for several months and that she had abandoned her New York apartment, a certain change came over her voice. In a tone of resignation and fatigue, she said that she wasn’t surprised. Amy had, after all, already been gone for a very long time as far as they were concerned. It was best for all concerned to let it go. If Amy was gone, it was by her choice, and there was nothing either of them, or anybody else, could do.
For a moment, Finn thought that this was not true, that Amy had to be found, and the proper authorities needed to be called in. Then, the full weight of Melinda’s resignation descended on him like a black fog. He realized that he did not have the right to impose themselves upon Amy, and neither did anybody else. But what, he wondered, if something horrible had happened to her? She was a young, diminutive, vulnerable woman in a great and evil world. But that was a risk, he realized, that Amy might have chosen to take. He had no choice but to respect her courage. He thanked Melinda and said he would call her with any updates. “Please don’t,” Melinda said, and after a long silence, she hung up.
For several days after, Finn took long walks around the campus, deep in thought. It was the spring thaw, and at times the mist was so thick that he lost his way. Yet for all his ruminations, he came no closer to any answers, nor indeed did it make him any surer of the questions, other than the obvious one of Amy’s whereabouts. At the end of the week, he dug the recording of Amy’s appearance out his closet and ran off five copies, which he stowed carefully away. Then, for the first time in days, he felt himself relax. The music, at least, was safe for now.
Over the next few months, he listened to the recording many times, always alone, always solely for himself. Amy, he felt, was in there, and he had to find her. But as the seasons changed at last and frigid Buffalo turned warm, he still had not found her, and began to despair that he ever would.
In early May, when the old singers would have sung of the pole and the Queen of the May, the thought occurred to him, and he called the Arlington’s house for a second time. The phone was answered by an unfamiliar voice, which he realized later must have been Amy’s mother, so he asked for Melinda. He was told she would be back by seven that night.
He called again at 7:15. This time, Melinda answered. He told her there was nothing new to report, and she did not sound surprised. Then he asked if he could drive up and visit them next weekend. “Why?” Melinda asked. “I’m looking for something,” Finn replied, “and I think it might be there.” There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Melinda said, “Ok,” and hung up.
That Saturday, Finn drove east to Syracuse. He arrived at the Arlington house around noon, and was struck by its size and opulence. He had not expected that a voice so replete with pathos could have come from someone so wealthy. Suffering, he thought, touches all of us.
No one answered the door at first, and Finn was afraid that he had come while the family was absent. But then the door opened and he found himself face to face with a 17-year-old girl, blonde and pale-skinned, with a vague resemblance to Amy, but more robust and athletic. She had a tomboyish air of prideful control of her surroundings, which at her age, Finn knew, could be nothing more than a bluff. He introduced himself and the girl identified herself as Melinda. When he held out his hand, she did not shake it, but ushered him into the house with no further ceremony.
Finn had lived a student’s existence for some time and, in any case, had not been born into a family of means. He was unused to houses of such size and scope or of the excessive cleanliness that comes from the ability to hire other people to do your cleaning for you. The place was all polished wood and glass, without the smell of cooked food or beer or cigarette smoke. It took him some time to grow accustomed to the great sterile glow of the house, which began to take on an oppressive quality, even as it sang, like a lonely siren, to that part of himself that, like all men, desires comfort and affluence and ease.
What struck him most of all was the incongruity of it. It seemed impossible that a girl as earthen as Amy could have come from so celestial a palace. But he thought of the shimmering vibrations of her voice, the stark clarity of line with which she sang, and he thought that, yes, she had brought some part of this crystalline dwelling with her into the gray and dusty world.
Melinda walked him through each of the great rooms, all of which reinforced his initial impression of an immaculate Xanadu. Once, as they passed the kitchen, he caught a glimpse of a scarlet-clad form disappear down a far hallway. He realized that it was, in all likelihood, Amy’s mother Elizabeth, who had chosen to remain present but unseen.
He did not see Elizabeth’s face then, but he did see it a few minutes later, staring out of a gold-framed black and white photograph on top of a grand piano. But this Elizabeth was a young woman, without much resemblance to Amy, who held a bouquet of flowers and smiled in a manner that was far too wide and broad to suit the occasion. On the mantlepiece over an ornate stone fireplace was a collection of similar photographs, and Melinda named each of the faces for him. When she came to one of a tall gentleman in a business suit and fedora hat, she said, “That’s my father. He died.”
Finn was on guard against vulgar psychoanalysis, but all the same, he lingered over that photograph and wondered it is could all be that simple, whether he had found the skeleton key to the whole mystery. But then he said, “Where’s Amy?” and gestured at the photographs. “Oh,” said Melinda, “she’s not here.”
They mounted a great mahogany staircase, and Melinda led him down a hallway to a very plain wooden door. “This is Amy’s room,” she said, in the present tense. Inside, Finn found himself in a child’s room, perfectly preserved, with stuffed animals arranged at the head of the bed and pink curtains that waved in the spring breeze. Betty and Veronica comic books lined the shelves along with Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. A tiny jewel box lay half open on the bedside table, and inside was the glint of a silver necklace that, for all he knew, was exactly where Amy had left it.
Melinda watched him for some time, then she opened a small closet and brought out a stack of notebooks. “Do you want these?” she asked. “They belong to her.”
Finn took one off the top, opened it, and stared down at the small, near perfect handwriting of a teenage girl. He saw the words and letters, but could not bring himself to read them, though he could tell they were either song lyrics or attempts at poetry. He took the stack from Melinda and crooked it under his arm. “Thank you,” he said. Melinda nodded and led him out of the room.
She showed him a few more rooms, but there was nothing of any interest there, and he had the strong sense that the visit had come to its natural end. He had the treasure he wanted, or at least as close as he could get to it, and one treasure is all one can hope for. That there might be two was all but impossible, and even if there were, he doubted that he would have the fortitude to absorb it. He told Melinda that he was ready to leave, and she led him down the grand staircase to the front door.
As they passed the kitchen, he heard the clatter of pots and pans, and wondered for a moment if Amy’s mother had announced herself. If she had, he thought, it would do her no good. She had rejected Amy, whom he had chosen to embrace, and thus she was of no interest to him.
Outside on the porch, Melinda said, “If I find anything else, I’ll let you know,” which, Finn realized, was a statement of despair. It was an acceptance that Amy would not return for what was hers, so it was time to pass on what she had left behind to those who might revere it in their way.
Finn murmured his thanks, and then, to his dismay, Melinda hugged him. It lasted for what seemed like a considerable time. Then she stepped away without ceremony and went back inside the house.
After his return to Buffalo, Finn did not look at the notebooks for several weeks. They sat on the coffee table amid the ashtrays and a discarded bong, and each morning and evening he passed by, saw them, and wondered if now was the time to open and read them. But each time he felt the immense weight of the find, and chose not to. He even went so far as to wonder if it might be best to burn them unread, as others had burned Byron’s autobiography and Kafka much of his own work.
The notebooks were, after all, private things, and he had not nor ever would receive Amy’s permission to violate that privacy. He felt, for a moment, the dilemma of the literary scholar or Egyptologist, whose job it is to expose and catalogue the remains of a life, of other human beings. He wondered if it was all a matter of time. If once one was dead long for enough, all the taboos that protect the self from the eyes of others dissipated away. Perhaps we are never more naked or vulnerable than in death or disappearance.
At last, on a warm late summer evening, he opened the first of the notebooks. Until dawn the next day, he read through each volume, afraid that out of impatience or indifference, he might miss something that could mean everything. He found beautiful lines on those yellowed pages, such as “the sound of the mountain echoes in her eyes,” “the wind of morning whispers in the darkling sky,” and “the road winds through a land of dust.”
But as he came to the end, he realized with a sigh that, while the notebooks had great value as historical documents, they were, in the end, all juvenilia, the first stirrings of the poetic spirit in a talented young girl who was, nonetheless, a young girl. It was better than the mash poetry of most adolescents, but it bore little resemblance to the creature who, he now realized, had haunted him for a very long time. These volumes would be of interest to future scholars and completists, but no more than that. He put the notebooks in a small trunk and placed it in the back of his closet. He did not look at them again.
Some time passed, and the summer gave way to another senescent autumn. The breeze became cooler, the moon larger again, and the trees began their strange, orange half-death from which they would emerge many months hence. On October 30, 1963, Finn attended a campus Halloween party and returned to his dorm very drunk with a woman named Susan who was two years older than him. Perhaps because of the cool of the evening, the inherent eeriness of the holiday, or some other reason, he stumbled into his closet, from which he took one of the recordings of Amy’s performance and put it on his reel-to-reel.
Susan sat and listened for several minutes, then she said, “Who is this?” Finn told her, and she asked, “Does she have any other albums?” “No,” Finn replied, “she’s gone.” Asked what he meant by that, he shrugged and said, “No one knows what happened to her.” Susan listened again for some time and then remarked, “It’s beautiful.” “Yes,” Finn said, “it is.”
The next evening, Finn took the tapes to the studio for his Halloween broadcast. He opened with the usual holiday greetings, and then recounted his encounter with Amy Arlington and the events that followed. “So,” he said, “in honor of Halloween, living or dead, this is a recording by a ghost.” He then played the tape in its entirety without interruption.
The next day, several students asked him for the name of the album, and he reminded them that there was no album. He offered, however, to run off a copy of the tape for them, which they were happy to accept. The same thing happened the next day, and every other day for the rest of the week. It ceased after that, but a month later, Finn himself was offered a copy by a complete stranger, and he realized that people were now distributing copies of their own copies, and perhaps copies of those, and so on into infinity.
As another winter drew near, Finn began to hear Amy’s plaintive voice more and more, at parties, from open windows, muffled behind the doors as he walked down dark hallways, or at low volume during the occasional tryst. On three separate occasions, he made love to Amy’s music, and wondered each time whether this was the only way Amy, who had always struck him as asexual, could or ever would make love.
Finn graduated in 1964, and embarked on his chosen career as a DJ, first at a local Buffalo station, then in Cincinnati, San Francisco, Nashville, and New York City. Each time he moved on, he brought Amy’s tapes with him, and developed a tradition. Each year on Halloween, on a cool and melancholy autumn night when the wind was high, he would play Amy’s tape in its entirety and recount the story of its recording. At first, he also asked anyone with knowledge of Amy’s whereabouts to contact the station, but no one ever did, and in the early 1970s, he gave up. If Amy was still out there, he decided, she would contact him, or not. It was her choice and her right. And if she was dead, it didn’t matter anyway.
In the mid-1980s, when folk music was its nadir, Melinda Arlington called him on a late evening in May. The Syracuse house had been sold, she told him, and in the process of dismantling the Arlingtons’ worldly goods, several boxes belonging to Amy had been found in the basement. She asked if he would like to take them. As she said it, Finn heard, for the first time, kindness in her voice.
Finn drove to Syracuse the next day, and found the house already stripped bare, its opulent rooms made large by emptiness. It was all bare walls and floors, the detritus of a life moved elsewhere, perhaps to storage, perhaps to the furnace. Melinda was there, now a mature and poised woman in her early 30s. Her husband scuttled around the house making last minute preparations for departure, and two toddlers, a boy and a girl who both resembled Amy, scuttled along after him.
Melinda told him she and her family now lived in a suburb three miles away, and her mother had been moved to a nursing home, which made the upkeep of such a large house unnecessary. “We’re content with less,” she said. She then showed him two cardboard boxes with Amy’s name written on the side. “That’s all there is,” she said. “Please take them.” He put them in the trunk of his car, and then Melinda hugged him for a second time and said, “Please take care of her.” She went back into the house to tend to her husband and children, and Finn drove away.
On the return journey, he felt some of the old excitement, but when he reached home and opened the boxes, he found only trinkets and dolls, the remains of a small child’s treasures, but nothing that could help him. A month later, Melinda called him for the last time and told him her mother had died. In answer to the question he wanted to ask but would not, she said that, on her deathbed, Elizabeth had not once mentioned Amy’s name.
After that, if Finn took comfort in anything, it was those Halloween evenings when he sent Amy’s voice out into the nocturnal world. As the years went by, the number of callers who asked for a copy grew larger, until he was forced to run off over a dozen a month and the original master was almost shredded. At last, he issued an ultimatum: If you wanted a copy, get it from someone who already had one. And they did. A cottage industry of sorts grew up, entirely of its own accord, dedicated to the gospel of Amy.
Soon, a single bootleg recording gained canonical status. “Amy Arlington: The Halloween Session” was inaccurate as to dates—the session had been held in October, but not on Halloween, though Finn had played it on Halloween so many times that the assumption was logical. The bootleg was a third or fourth-generation copy, its sound quality was inconsistent, and two of the songs contained inexplicable gaps of three to five seconds when nothing at all could be heard. Nonetheless, the notes were, for the most part, clear, and in some ways the muddy sound only enhanced the eerie dissonance of Amy’s vocals, which rose up as if through a gray veil that separated the living from the dead.
As the ‘80s became the ‘90s and then the aughts in turn, Finn began to notice that young people, born long after the session itself, had begun to ask him if he was the Derek Finn, the one who had made the sole recording of Amy Arlington. When he admitted that he was, he would find himself peppered with questions. The most common was the dreaded “What was she really like?” But this was the one question he could not answer. He could recount the circumstances of their acquaintance and the details of the recording session, but he had no idea at all what Amy was “really like,” and was not sure anyone else did either, even those few who were closest to her. So, he would always respond with a line stolen from Charlie Chaplin: “If you want to know what she was like, listen to her music.”
That was what they did. The “Halloween Session” bootleg spread so far and wide that Finn began to hear pieces of Amy surface like flotsam. He heard odd resonances, distinct echoes, in the music of Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant, and even veterans like Stevie Nicks and incongruities like Nirvana. People, Finn realized, were listening, serious people, and they had been listening for a long time. In 2002, he was told that Joan Baez had sung “Tygers” several times in concert, though he was not able to verify this himself. He did hear a bootleg of the Grateful Dead in which they performed the song, which had occurred just once on their innumerable tours.
He enjoyed the irony. Back in the day, people could not stand to hear Amy sing. Now they were singing her. Nonetheless, no one in the mainstream was yet speaking of Amy. Her name was yet to be amplified.
That changed, at long last, in 2004, when Finn was approached by a representative of the Arlington family and asked for the master copy of the Halloween Session. It was, said the representative, the only extant recording of Amy in performance, and Columbia Records had asked to purchase the rights. The venerable company, he stated, believed there was sufficient underground enthusiasm for Amy’s music to justify an official release. A substantial sum of money was involved, and the family was enthusiastic at the prospect. Finn would be credited as producer and given a modest percentage, but he should be aware of the fact that the family was prepared to take legal action to obtain the tape if necessary.
Finn replied that it would not be necessary. He had only one question, which was why Melinda had not contacted him personally. “The family prefers to act through intermediaries,” the representative said, and that was all he would say.
The contracts were signed the next week and Finn handed over the tapes. He kept one first-generation copy for himself, though the lawyers involved did not know it. It would be, he decided, for his own personal use. The day after the handover, he was struck by a brief attack of profound melancholy, as he realized that, for a very long time, Amy had belonged more or less to him. All these years, he had carried the torch alone. Now, she would belong to everybody else. He was glad of that, since he had always been a partisan of Amy’s music, but he felt as if a long and intimate relationship had just ended. He and Amy had broken up, in all probability for good, and he would mourn that relationship, because he knew he would never have another like it.
The album was released in 2005—on Halloween, of course—and was entitled “Amy Arlington: Good Night and Sweet Dreams.” The subtitle, intended to reassure decades of fans that, yes, this was the recording, was “The Legendary Halloween Session.” The liner notes contained a few brief and sanitized details on Amy’s life and the origins of the recording, along with some innocuous comments from Finn himself. Also included was a narrative and timeline of the recording’s journey through the underground to its final release by a major label. In its final summation, the text asserted—rightly, Finn believed—that Amy had been more or less a decade ahead of her time. She had anticipated female troubadours like Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian, and Carole King, as well as their numerous heirs who emerged in force in the 1990s. The final assessment, however, was that Amy’s style was sui generis, without precedent and without successors. She was, it said, “the female Bob Dylan before Bob Dylan, but also wholly unlike him or indeed anyone.” Had she not disappeared, it asserted, she would have bent the arc of American music in some unknowable but no doubt remarkable direction.
Of that disappearance, the notes said little, and indeed the entire tone was of a eulogy rather than a biography of someone who might still be alive. It seemed to have been assumed by all involved that Amy was dead, though so far as Finn was aware, she had never been declared as such. Still, he thought, someone was going to get the money, and it wasn’t Amy.
Someone did indeed get the money. The album went gold within two months and won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, a remarkable feat for a recording that was already four decades old. Soon, the likes of Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, and even Lady Gaga covered Amy’s songs. “Tygers” was the most popular choice, for reasons that remain unknown. But when Finn heard it sung for the fifth time on American Idol, he realized Amy had written a belated classic.
The covers and even a few of Amy’s original performances began to appear on television and movie soundtracks, and there was even talk that Martin Scorsese would direct a film on the mystery of Amy’s disappearance. Finn enjoyed speculating on who might play him. He hoped—given the Scorsese connection—that it might be Robert De Niro. In the end, the film was never made, but Finn did appear as himself in an effusive BBC documentary, which helped introduce Amy’s album to Europe. There, it proved even more successful, and sold over 400,000 copies.
Over the entire Amy phenomenon, however, hung the unanswerable question of what had happened to her. Given that she did not emerge from hiding to take part in her sudden success, it was assumed once again that she was dead, but this only raised the larger question of the circumstances of her possible death.
Rolling Stone and the Atlantic both published investigative reports on the disappearance, which included extensive interviews with Finn but none with any family members. Despite their extensive research, the journalists discovered nothing that had not been known since 1962. Amy was last seen by Finn as she walked into the autumn night after their famous session. There, the trail went cold.
The articles speculated that Amy might have met a violent end that night and her body so well disposed of, perhaps in the East River, that no trace of it had ever been found. Or perhaps she went straight to the Port Authority, boarded a bus to somewhere far away, and melted into the great American expanse, maybe in a small Midwestern town that never had and never would know anything of Amy Arlington. There was also the very unpleasant possibility of suicide, but how it might have been done or why it was never discovered remained unanswerable. As Rolling Stone concluded its article: “Perhaps we will have to make peace with the fact that Amy Arlington will always remain a ghost.”
As for Finn, he has chosen to maintain his vigil, gratified by the small role he played in making Amy a shadow influence on American music and then, at long last, a star. He continues to play Amy’s recording in full every Halloween, though it is now the sonically far superior official release. Each time, he says the same thing he said the first time, now many decades ago: “This is music by a ghost.” He has had no further contact with the Arlington family, though he wonders sometimes if Melinda is just sentimental enough to tune in on All Hallows Eve to hear her sister’s voice once again.
He wonders as well what would happen if Amy reappeared, claimed her mantle, and revealed the skeleton key—the answers to all the questions asked over the long decades, now six in number. Finn knows it will soon be seven decades and then eight, and he will not be there to see it. But Amy is still there, though she is not there, as she has always been. He contents himself in the knowledge that, when the time comes, he will at least have remained true to the one true love of his life.