Denver — Swallow Hill Music Association is thrilled to present two living folk legends for one very special evening of music, Rosalie Sorrels and Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

One critic described Rosalie Sorrels' singing voice as one of the most wonderful voices in American music, an instrument as mellow and finely aged as an antique viola. Gamble Rodgers referred to her as the hillbilly Edith Piaf. Born in Idaho nearly 70 years ago, she began her career as a folklorist in the 1950s, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the folk idiom, ranging from the English ballads to Mormon songs to the work of contemporary songwriters—not just the songs but also the tradition from which they are derived. Her songs and stories serve to create and preserve the oral tradition. Sorrels left her husband in the mid-1960s and went on the road with her five children to begin a career as a musician. Sorrels' homes in Boise and then in Salt Lake City were the stopping places for just about any creative person who came through town, including not only musicians but some of the pivotal figures of the Beat Generation, many of them have remained her friends and sometime collaborators.

In recognition of her role as a creator of and collaborator in the American culture of the second half of the twentieth century, the University of California at Santa Cruz has set up a Rosalie Sorrels Archive as part of its Beat Generation Archives. The University of Idaho awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree in 2000. In 2001 the Boise Peace Quilt Project presented her with a peace quilt, adding her name to the distinguished list of workers for peace and justice who have been presented with quilts. Through her career, she has recorded more than 20 albums and written three books, including Way Out in Idaho, published in honor of the Idaho centenary—a monumental collection of songs, stories, pictures, and recipes gathered in the course of three years spent traveling around her home state and listening to its people. The Chicago Reader says, "Sorrels has decried the music industry's attempt to homogenize women and ethnicity into something blander. She's living proof that there are some things the biz just can't whitewash."

There’s as much drifting around Ramblin' Jack Elliott which is mythology as there is which has stuck and become a part of him. What reality there is constantly mutates into visions of a man walking off into the sunset or crawling off before sunrise. He's an encyclopedic compilation of everyone he's ever befriended in almost 70 years, including Jack Nicholson, Robert Duvall, Janis Joplin, and some guy known as "Maggie's old man" from Maggie, North Carolina. A life-long aspiring cowboy, he's rode saddle broncos and bareback horses. A master storyteller, as well as the subject of many stories himself, Elliott's career parallels the growth of the American folk music boom from the early 1950s when he first "rambled" around the country with Woody Guthrie (his major musical influence) through the early 1960s when he influenced a young Bob Dylan in New York's Greenwich Village.

Hailed by Newsweek as "one of the few authentic voices in folk music," in recent years Elliott has gained mass recognition, most notably in 1996 with a Grammy win for his South Coast album. His latest release, The Long Ride, "may be his most ambitious yet." (San Francisco Chronicle) Special guests abound and there is a breadth of covers and originals that will delight folk and roots aficionados. Elliott is certainly a living American music legend.

These two marvelous trailblazers in the folk world will come together for one special night at Swallow Hill Music Association, making for a historic evening as Swallow Hill's legacy of pioneering folk in the West complements the musicians taking its Daniels Hall stage. Any folkie would be a fool to miss out on this unique experience.