The life and death of Lisa Kindred, a Marin blues singer with a big voice and a big heart

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Lisa Kindred, a beloved Marin County blues singer who gave up an early shot at stardom to pursue her music on her own terms, has died at 79.

“You have to be passionate about music,” she once said. “If you want to make money, do something else.”

Ms. Kindred, a longtime performer at the No Name Bar in Sausalito and the Saloon in San Francisco’s North Beach, passed away Nov. 11 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael from POEMS syndrome, a rare blood disorder that can cause weakness in the arms and legs and eventually respiratory failure. She also suffered from diabetes and had been in various hospitals and rehabilitation facilities since a fall at her San Anselmo home in April.

“She was a big-hearted woman and a big-throated woman,” said Austin deLone, a Mill Valley keyboardist who played on and co-produced Ms. Kindred’s final album, 2013’s “Blues and Beyond.” “She was a powerhouse of a singer and a great person.”

An Independent Journal review praised the album as “soul stirring … a masterwork.” Music critic Joel Selvin called Ms. Kindred “a bona fide blues queen who sings like one of the greats.” And blues harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite, commenting on her lack of recognition outside of Bay Area blues circles, remarked that she “had been overlooked too long.”

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1940, Ms. Kindred was a fresh-faced young folksinger when she emerged on the national scene in 1965 with the release of “I Like It This Way,” her debut album on Vanguard Records, a prestigious label for folk, jazz and blues musicians.

“I was a freshman at Harvard and had Lisa’s first Vanguard album on my windowsill,” deLone recalled. “I can still picture it to this day. I loved that record and I loved what was going on at the time musically.”

Ms. Kindred was then part of the 1960s folk revival, performing on the Greenwich Village/Cambridge club circuit, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing at Club 47, Café Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City, legendary venues that launched the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush, Eric Anderson and other folk stars.

“It was exactly the right time to be starting out,” she said in a 2013 Independent Journal interview. “What a phenomenal era musically. I got to hear people like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James before they died. I would go around the corner from where I lived in New York to the Jazz Gallery, where Thelonious Monk would be playing three nights a week, or McCoy Tyner. I’m glad I’m this age. It was wonderful.”

In 1966, she formed a short-lived all-female rock band, the UFOs, and was interviewed by Leonard Bernstein for the 1967 documentary “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.” In a bizarre episode from that tumultuous era, her second Vanguard album, originally titled “Kindred Spirit,” was waylaid by Mel Lyman, a musician in her backing band who became the leader of a notorious personality cult. Four years later, the album came out on Warner Bros./Reprise as “American Avatar – Love Comes Rolling Down,” with Lyman’s picture on the cover.

“That never did sit well with Lisa, nor with anyone else who knew about it,” said John Besharian, Ms. Kindred’s ex-husband, a guitarist who played with her before, during and after their marriage.

“It was too bad, but I didn’t care at that point,” Ms. Kindred remarked in 2013.

By then, she’d decided that the lifestyle of an itinerant folkie wasn’t for her.

“I was on the road four out of every five weeks,” she recalled. “It was grueling. I was out there alone with my guitar, going from one airplane to another, flying to Chicago, Boston, St. Louis. I never got a chance to do a lot of things you want to do when you’re growing up. I had to decide whether I wanted to have a life or be on the road.”

She decided to have a life and to have music be a part of it, but only a part. She remembered how smitten she’d been with California after playing a gig at the Troubadour, the famed Hollywood club, and moved to Southern California for a few years at the end of the ’60s before finding her way to Marin County. She and her then husband lived in Stinson Beach after being married in 1970 on Mount Tamalpais. Guitarist Rik Elswit, who officiated the wedding ceremony, played with Ms. Kindred in a couple of Bay Area bands during that period.

“She’d lost any ambition to become a major star,” he recalled. “She just wanted to sing the blues. She wanted to be one of those old blues broads that she’d emulated, and she made it.”

Ms. Kindred eventually settled in Mill Valley, living for years in an apartment above Prune Music, a store frequented by local rock musicians in the 1970s. Singing with her own band, she became a fixture on the Marin and San Francisco bar scene, kicking off her sets with a rousing rendition of “Let the Good Times Roll.”

“I trusted her so much,” said musician Willie Riser, her bass player for more than 30 years. “She was such an honest and steadfast friend. Her character was unimpeachable.”

During her time in Mill Valley, she became known in community education circles for her day job — as a first-grade teacher’s aide at Park School, handling yard duty in the morning and at lunch. She also ran a supervised play program for the city of Mill Valley.

“The children loved her, the parents loved her and the teachers loved her,” said first-grade teacher Ro Rigney, who worked with Ms. Kindred in the classroom for a decade. She and Ms. Kindred also practiced a form of Japanese Buddhism and sang together in a local Buddhist choir.

When she wasn’t singing in bars and clubs, often taking the bus from Marin to her gigs in the city, Ms Kindred was a volunteer performer for the nonprofit Bread & Roses, playing frequently with guitarist Kurt Huget at drug and alcohol rehab facilities.

“Playing in drug and rehab places was great because she empathized with the people we were performing for, and you could tell they really appreciated and understood that,” Huget said. “She set an example for them and for all of us.”

Mike Mugridge, a friend who became her driver, caregiver and medical advocate, was by her hospital bedside right up to the end.

“Her friends came in and were able to say their goodbyes,” he said. “Once the last of her friends came through, she decided it was time and let go. If I were to describe Lisa, she was obviously a talented musician and singer, but her humanity as a person outshined everything.”

Ms. Kindred has no known survivors. A celebration of her life is being planned by her friends and fellow musicians.

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