Kate Wolf’s music lives on at 23rd annual Laytonville festival

For both new fans and those who have never forgotten, a new Kate Wolf album with unreleased original songs will debut at this year’s 23rd annual Kate Wolf Festival.

Wolf, the beloved folk singer with strong Sonoma County ties, known for heartfelt songs such as “Across the Great Divide,” died of leukemia in 1986 at age 44.

The festival, which began as a one-day fundraiser at Caswell Vineyards near Occidental in 1996, has grown to a four-day event at Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville, 110 miles north of Santa Rosa.

Headliners at the 23rd annual festival, from June 28 to July 1, include the Indigo Girls, Los Lobos, Joan Osborne and Ani DiFranco.

The genesis of the new album, titled “Live in Mendocino,” was a posthumous 75th birthday party held in Wolf’s honor in January 2017, at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage club.

For that party, Kate’s son, Max Wolf, hired veteran photographer Nicholas Wilson, who’d recorded Kate’s live shows in Mendocino in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Wilson “mentioned that he had these tapes,” Max said in a phone interview, “but I didn’t know that there were high-quality originals.”

Max conferred with his sister, Hannah Wolf, and chose to move forward. A business systems analyst at Pandora in Oakland, Max digitized and catalogued about 15 hours of cassette tapes.

“We took nearly 200 songs and narrowed it down to maybe 60 songs where the performance was decent and the recording was decent,” he said, “not interrupted, for example, by the tape being turned over.”

The family then turned to Kate’s longtime accompanist, guitarist Nina Gerber, who trimmed the list.

“What guided her was what she learned from Kate,” Max said. “We could have put out two or three CDs, but Nina nixed a lot of the recordings simply because she felt they wouldn’t be up to Kate’s standards.”

Twenty songs made the cut, including three unreleased originals that express facets of Kate’s personality from playfully romantic (“You and I Together”) to the profound joy of having a baby (“Golden Harmony”).

A Kickstarter campaign raised just over $20,000 to fund the album. Supporters will receive it in July, and the CD will be on sale at the festival for $15.

Hearing the music was emotional for the family, said Hannah Wolf, Kate’s daughter and Max’s younger sister.

“When I heard the raw recording for the first time, it just made me weep,” she said.

“Kate sounded so young and so lively. Live recordings offer you that little extra insight into what the performers are like onstage,” Hannah added, noting she’s now 50, six years older than her mother was when she died.

“It’s nice to hear Kate laughing and chatting with her friends and with the audience. For me, it had been a long time since something felt that immediate and took me back in that way.”

Hannah and Max attend the festival, and both said they’re gratified that the annual event, created by Sebastopol concert promoter Cloud Moss, has helped keep Kate’s songs alive and extended her legacy of communal connection.

Moss said that while the festival - which draws more people from Sonoma County than any other - has grown, it hasn’t lost its sense of intimacy.

A new shade structure at the main stage this year will help keep festival-goers cool, and Moss encourages people to bring reusable water bottles and refill them at the potable water stations throughout the grounds.

Max said that beyond the continued sharing of her music, the festival provides a “physical place we can go.”

Asked to describe her mother, Hannah called her genuine and said there was nothing ever forced or pretentious about her.

This year’s festival has a “dream lineup” led by tremendously talented women artists, she said. “I wish Kate were here to see it. She would love it.”

A project manager in the video game industry, Hannah’s avocation is singing with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.

The only time she’ll sing at the festival, she said, is during the closing number, when dozens of musicians gather to sing Kate’s signature song, “Give Yourself to Love.”

Hannah remembers her mother as “an immensely practical woman raised by a family of practical women. She taught me how to bake bread and how to make preserves.”

Max, asked what he misses most about his mother, said: “Not the music, because I have so much of that. I miss her most as a mother. I would like to share with her things that have been going on in my life since she passed away, 30-plus years ago. She never met my wife, and of course never met her grandchildren.”

Max says he’s the only member of the Wolf clan who is not musical, but he said the next generation’s got talent.

“I’ve seen them (Kate’s grandchildren) being musical, and some of her traits show up in them. I would dearly love to be able to share that with her.”

Michael Shapiro is the author of “A Sense of Place” and writes about entertainment and travel for national magazines and The Press Democrat.