Rev. Judy Kelly died at the age of 74 in the small town of Jeffersonville, Indiana on May 26th 2010. She lived there most of her adult life where she was known primarily as a loving wife, mother, and grandmother as well as a passionate believer in the gospel of Christ. But life is long and a lot of weird things can happen.

Way out west, and more than forty years before moving to Indiana, she was born Judy Esther Voiten. Under that name she was crowned Queen of Snake River Jamboree at age ten, America's Champion Yodeler the following year, and Miss Idaho after graduating high school. After being judged the runner up in that year's Miss America pageant, she had gained a bit of national fame.

Billing herself as Judy Lynn she later put those yodeling skills to use as an entertainer. After a few years as a working musician she finally cracked the top ten with her hit Footsteps of a Fool in 1962, a classic Hank Williams style ballad of heartbreak and regret.

It's nearly a perfect song, in my opinion, one that tells a familiar story in concise poetic language with a dramatic lift in the bridge that falls into a hook that is just memorable enough to stick without being obnoxious. It's everything that a country song ought to be.

I'm glad that our MFT Indiana Covers curator, Sharlene Birdsong, dug this up and that she chose Rachel Peacock and Vess Von Ruhtenberg to present it. Vess is one of the most talented people I've ever met. I had the pleasure of working with him on an MFT EP in a Weekend. He breathes creativity. I've seen him write and record parts on the spot in one take. Somehow though, in all the years I've known Rachel, I have never heard her sing. Now that I have, I'm thinking the same thing our curator was thinking, give me some more!

 

I like the vibe of this cover more than I do the original. It's sounds like The Rolling Stones when they were hanging out with Graham Parsons. Rachel's vocals dig deep into in the heart, and the lazy rhythm feels like a hot summer evening on the porch with friends. As much as I love country music, I do enjoy it more when it's done by rock and rollers.

It’s fascinating to me the way that songs and musical ideas are transformed through each performance. In folk and popular music the notion that a song or musical idea could be have ownership didn’t exist until new technologies allowed recorded music to become widely distributed. Before that time a song was the product of a community of musicians and writers. Ideas were borrowed freely in a sort of dialogue as the song changed organically with the times.

As the recording industry developed so did notions of intellectual property. For instance Robert Johnson, who actually died the year that Judy Lynn was born, famously travelled all through the South and took the best licks from the best players he could find (or perhaps he sold his soul to the devil to get those licks as he claimed.) He happened to exist at the crossroads when that kind of borrowing was commonplace and when that borrowing was considered theft. While he didn’t see any significant profit from his recordings, as recording of black music of the era was extremely exploitative, the people who own them have made a fortune. A.P. Carter, the godfather of country music, also travelled around that time from holler to holler through Appalachia to collect the best songs which he then copyrighted as his own and from which he made enough money to provide for his family.

An interesting thing about the early sixties when Footsteps of a Fool was written and recorded is that it was common for a song to be released in one market, altered slightly by someone who heard it, and then released in another market. For instance, a hit coming out of Memphis would be unfamiliar to a Los Angeles audience and could be presented as original material. Markets were also segregated by race.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that in 1962 in addition to Judy Lynn’s Footsteps of a Fool, Mavis Rivers’ Footsteps of a Fool and Ben E. King’s Walking in the Footsteps of a Fool were also released. Ben E. King’s take is a soulful tune with a tango rhythm that seems to be a tender, line by line reply to Mavis Rivers about how he can’t stop his crazy heart from following her to ruin. Judy Lynn’s tune has little in common with either of them aside from the hook. Taken out of context this exchange of ideas seems no different than the communal nature of songwriting in the past, but when the commodification of culture through copyright is factored with the power relations created by segregation it paints a different picture. Forgive the digression, but I thought that was worth sharing.

I’ll leave you with one last thing that turned up in my research for this article. I found one recording that Judy Lynn made after she quit show business to preach the gospel. In 1997 she sang with an orchestra in Mexico City. I ordered the CD from Christ Gospel Churches International. I’ll leave you with an excerpt here.