The lyrics of the first song on “Upbeat,” folk singer Kristin Lems’ newest release and first CD, go like this:
“Are you fed up? Are you beat down? Move on bravely ahead. Feel like no one wants you around? Move on bravely ahead.”
It could be an anthem for lots of us, but especially for Lems herself. Times are tough for folk singers. Chicago folk stages like Holstein’s and Crosscurrents are only a memory now, and Lems really can’t afford to sing for tips at the new coffee houses.
“Once in a while I will do that just so that the public at large can come and see me, but I’d say 70 to 80 percent of my gigs are closed events–a school, a birthday party, a marriage, a benefit, an educational thing of some sort,” Lems says.
“Venues of the coffee house and bar type are hard to come by. I had one in Wilmette, called Strange Brew, that I really liked, but then their roster got so big because started flocking to them from the city and suburbs too. So I might sing there one night every three or four months. You can’t build momentum with your fans that way.
“I think what’s happening is that all these places are testing the waters. They don’t know what’s going to fly, and they want to book the maximum number of artists to see where they strike gold. So they’re not willing to take a risk on you when there’s all these other people floating around who also have mailing lists and are releasing CDs and so on.”
Singer-songwriter Lems first made a splash in the 1970s with her feminist songs on such topics as abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. One of the best known is “Mammary Glands,” which lampoons men who treat women as the supporting cast for large breasts. Gloria Steinem called Lems “a one-woman argument against the notion that the women’s movement has no sense of humor.”
Lems’ songs always have reflected the political climate and her own life.
Ironically, in the 1980s shortly after she recorded the song “Proposal,” about a woman who turned down an offer of marriage (“Do you think I’d trade my freedom for your golden wedding ring?”), Lems married a man she met while on a Fulbright Lectureship to train teachers in Algiers.
That marriage collapsed in 1992. Lems now is a single mom raising a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son, working a 40-hour week teaching English as a second language at National Louis University and casting about for gigs.
“Upbeat” reflects the turmoil she went through. “They’re the songs that helped me get through the night,” Lems says.
“Without going into any detail, the marriage had many unstable propositions in it. The intercultural factor was difficult. And, of course, my feminist background and reluctance to marry at all were factors. He expected that I immediately stop singing, and I had never had a clue that was expected of a wife of his, so that put us into immediate conflict.
“And it didn’t help my career, I must say, because I tried for a while to walk in the middle, to not sing too much.”
Keeping her music alive, Lems says, “has been the hardest proposition when music is such an uncertain thing and when you have to pay regular bills. I’m not traveling light anymore.
“Luckily for me I have enough of a reputation and momentum that the gigs keep coming in. I don’t have anyone booking me, but once a week there’s a phone call. Somebody wants me to do something, and so I work maybe four to six places a month. But the other factor is that I can’t start at 11 p.m. and go until 3 a.m. anymore. It’s too punishing on my routine.”
But Lems, who lives in Evanston, can’t keep her clear, sweet soprano voice silent for long. “I keep going for two reasons,” she says. “There’s no enjoyment like the enjoyment of performing. Nothing compares to it. It’s beautiful. It’s spiritual. It’s exciting. It’s stimulating. It’s very gratifying and it’s a great, great boost to one’s sense of worth, because so often I’m singing for worthwhile causes and I feel that I’m helping them.
“I know that I can help bring audiences together. The music suddenly makes them one in a way that no speech can do.
“The other reason is truly force of habit. I’ve done it for so many years that it really is part of my life. It’s woven into my expectations of my life. If I go too long without having a performance, I feel something is wrong with my life, something is not going right.”
Lems grew up in Evanston. Her parents were Northwestern University students in the 1940s who married and decided to stay there. She started singing young. She sang so loudly and joyously at the Unitarian Church Sunday school she attended that her sister refused to stand next to her. Throughout high school she was a prolific poet and wrote her first song at age 18.
She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in English in 1972 and then earned two master’s degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Middle Eastern studies and teaching English as a second language.
“I have had some formal training in music, but the credentials I feel are indisputable in my music are the fact that I grew up in the home of my mother, Carol Lems-Dworkin, who is a concert pianist. The richness of that exposure, being around great, highly trained artists on a regular basis, gave me a confidence in music. Even though I don’t have a degree in music, I know it through and through. It was no surprise that I went into music. The only interesting or surprising thing was that I took the singer-songwriter route.”
As a parent of young children, Lems has put some of her music into parenting. She says that “the preponderance of songs that I’ve written for the last three years are children’s songs because they’re songs that I can write quickly. Suddenly children’s music became important to me, and when I didn’t find a song on a certain topic, I just wrote one.” Lems recorded an album of children’s songs, “Sharing” and has another batch of 14 songs waiting in the wings that she hopes to record for a children’s record label.
As for her adult songs, she says it takes “a great leap of faith to keep putting out these cassettes and CDs and just believe they’ll fall into hands that can use them in their lives or in making a better world.”
To some extent her hopes are rewarded. Letters trickle in from people who may have heard her in the 1970s and keep following her work.
“The other thing I’m really happy about–and this is really bragging–is that my songs are going all kinds of places that I can’t go. They’re being recorded by other artists. I’ve had 12 artists record my songs. None of them is a superstar, but each of them is singing my songs regularly and selling their tapes or CDs of my songs.”
Lems’ songs have been used in several productions as well. Most recently the Illinois Farm Bureau used her song “Farmer,” a tribute to women farmers, in a video about women and farming.
And a song called “Hattie,” about a black child integrating a school, may be used in an upcoming documentary about Jewish children who were adopted by non-Jewish European families during World War II. One of the people the filmmakers interviewed was a Lincolnwood woman who told them that listening to songs like “Hattie” gives her strength.
Lems’ success is relative and quiet, but she’s at peace with that. “I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be a star,” she says, “and I can live with that.
“But I’m going to keep on singing until my voice leaves permanently or until I drop dead.”
