Woodstock will honor the life and legacy of singer-songwriter Judy Whitfield with a celebration at the Colony Cafe on Wednesday, June 11, featuring live music and storytelling to remember a woman who shaped the town’s creative spirit for more than three decades.
“Judy was the central connector to so many different people in the Woodstock and New York City arts scenes,” said musician Baker Rorick. “There was no one else like her.”
Whitfield embraced the Woodstock scene in 1990, when she relocated there after a successful performing career in New York City. From 1993 to 1994, she booked and hosted the Women in Music series at the Tinker Street Café, featuring performers including singer-songwriter Bar Scott, Beat-generation poet Janine Pommy Vega and guitarists Ellen McIlwaine and Cindy Cashdollar.
“I met her around the time she started the Women in Music series,” said Cashdollar, a Grammy-winning musician and Woodstock native who performed with Asleep at the Wheel. “It was like ‘Howdy folks, there’s a new sheriff in town and we’re gonna shake this place down!’ She wanted to infuse some energy into the waning live music scene. I liked her immediately when I first met her, loved her light and energy.”
A prolific songwriter with an exceptional vocal range, Whitfield’s style included elements of pop, rock, folk, jazz and country. She was comfortable in musical settings that ranged from acoustic instrumentation and keyboards to synthesizers and drum machines.
Whitfield performed at the Colony and the Bearsville Theater with the likes of John Herald, Spider Barbour, Paul McMahon and at numerous other Hudson Valley venues and festivals. Her enthusiasm for Woodstock drew artists including noted sound engineer and producer Julie Last, who in the late 1970s had gotten Whitfield a job as a receptionist at the legendary Record Plant Studios in New York.
“Judy was fierce, funny, full of sarcasm, warmth, and heart,” said Last, who went on to work with Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Rickie Lee Jones and later opened Coldbrook Studio near Whitfield’s home in Woodstock. “She greeted rock stars and lunch delivery guys with equal good humor. Everyone loved her.”
Whitfield was born Nov. 20, 1949 in Long Beach, California, and called herself an Air Force brat, growing up in Alaska, England, and Southern California. She sang about that childhood in “Early Life,” remembering Alaska’s “six months of winter,” castles and cathedrals in England that “inspired the little girl in me” and California’s “cute boys on bandstands.”
Whitfield began writing songs at 19 and taught herself to play the guitar, forming the folk-rock band Four Roses in San Francisco. That’s where she met Last, reconnecting later in New York.
She wrote songs and sang for a series of New York bands throughout the 1980s, working with groups including Cheap Date, the Millionaires and eventually the Judy Whitfield Band at venues including CBGB, Trax, the Bitter End and Kenny’s Castaways.
Eventually, she segued into solo work, accompanying herself on guitar at venues such as the Bluebird Café in Nashville and the Iguana Café in L.A. as well as Café Sin-é and the Knitting Factory in New York. She recorded a six-song EP, ”Point of No Return,” described by Billboard as “a sophisticated and intelligent blend of pop music,” wrote for artists including Penny Arcade, Maria Manhattan, and the Peter Healey Dance Company and collaborated with Cheryl Poivier of Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
Whitfield kept performing for a time after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1998, appearing in Oaxaca, Mexico and western Ireland.
“Ultimately, her illness made it difficult to be on stage so she put her guitar away and stopped performing,” said Last, recalling the monthly Music at the Movies that they created at the Tinker Street Cinema in 2005. “These shows were possibly the first time live music had been played at the cinema since Hendrix hung out there in the 1960s.”
Whitfield also conducted songwriting workshops at local elementary schools. She drew inspiration from her students and the children of her friends, said artist Leslie Bryce, recalling two songs she wrote about the son of Stephanie Barnes.
In her last years, Whitfield was mostly confined to home.
“We’d spend many happy hours getting silly on her streamside porch,” said longtime friend Mariella Bisson. “Judy was blessed with a lovely speaking voice, deep and smooth as honey, as well as a singing voice. I will always recall with great fondness our long telephone chats.”
“As her disease progressed, Whitfield accepted each loss to her way of life with grace, doing her best to adapt to each new hurdle,” said Eeo Stubblefield, who cared for her until her death and helped organize next week’s celebration.
“Judy was a strong, independent, and wise woman who taught me so much,” Stubblefield said.
A celebration of Judy Whitfield’s life will be held on Wednesday, June 11.
Her ashes will be interred at 5 p.m. at the Woodstock Artists Cemetery.
The Colony will host an evening gathering beginning at 6 p.m., with musical performances by Julie Last, Robert Burke Warren, Paul McMahon, Sylvia Bullett, and others. Remembrances begin at 7 p.m. The event will include Whitfield’s recorded music, videos and photography. Admission is free; donations will be accepted to benefit the Woodstock Library’s Music Archive.For more information: colonywoodstock.com/shows
Holly George-Warren is a contributing writer and is currently writing a biography of Jack Kerouac.