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.

A trailblazer, Sorrels left her husband in the 1960s to hit the road as a musician. Her homes in Boise and Salt Lake City became stopping points for many pivotal figures in music as well as the Beat Generation. 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. An advocate of peace, she was presented with a peace quilt in 2001 by the Boise Peace Quilt Project, her name alongside other peace and justice workers.

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."

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