Election Section

When Nancy Schimmel is invited to perform for a fourth grade California History unit, she tells stories using her mother Malvina Reynolds’ experiences in the 1906 quake, then sings “Heroes,” a song Nancy wrote about acts of courage in crisis by ordinary people. 

For the fifth grade U. S. History unit, she tells stories about her own participation in the 1963 “I have a dream” March on Washington and in the later San Francisco Palace Hotel sit-ins for black workers’ rights, then sings “A Child Like Me,” her song about child activists. 

“I’m thinking about a song for the Rosie the Riveter Park in Richmond, inspired by my mother’s working in a World War II bomb-casing factory while my father built scaffolding at the Mare Island shipyards,” she said. 

Nancy’s mother Malvina wrote her first songs in 1948 when she and Nancy’s father, carpenter, raconteur, and union organizer Bud Reynolds were working on the Henry Wallace campaign. Nancy was about 13, and the meld of music and activism was in the very air she breathed in their homes in northern and southern California. She had some piano and dance lessons, but she wasn’t looking toward a career in music. 

She entered UC in 1952, first with an interest in zoology, but took her degree in psychology. “Why? I don’t know, because people were always telling me their troubles? By the time I graduated, I knew I didn’t want to be a therapist.” 

The man she married in the late ‘50s was a social worker. “I tried that for about a year,” she said, “but it wasn’t for me.”  

She and her husband lived in San Francisco, where Nancy was active in neighborhood community organizations and in wider ones, like Women for Peace. She also sang and did storytelling in the Potrero Hill Library. Inspired by the community-oriented librarian at Potrero Hill, she went to library school, and became a children’s librarian in 1965. For the next 10 years she answered reference questions, helped kids find books, and did the storytelling hour in libraries all over the Bay Area. 

“First in the city, then in Marin County, then San Mateo County, all the way from Belmont to Pescadero,” Nancy said, as she laughed. “You know how books in certain fields, like astrology, tend to get stolen from libraries—in Pescadero it was the books on goat husbandry.” 

She also became active in the American Library Association. 

The mid-’70s brought big changes: she ended her marriage, came out as a lesbian, and quit her library job. That was when Guy Carawan (of the famous civil rights center, the Highlander School in Tennessee) persuaded her to attend the 1975 Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. 

“The scales dropped from my eyes!” Nancy said. “I took my retirement money out of the state fund, bought a van and hit the road. Through my ALA contacts, I knew librarians all over the country who invited me to tell stories or do a workshop.” 

For seven months Nancy and her then-partner Carole drove 22,000 miles, giving over 60 performances and workshops, attending 20 Women Library Workers meetings, hitting two conferences along the way. 

“It was great, but I never spent that much time on the road again,” she said. “I was a basketcase by the time we got home!” 

Since 1976 Nancy has been based in Berkeley and for nearly that long has been with Berkeley librarian Claudia Morrow. 

“Claudia used to be a lawyer,” Nancy said. “She’s a great organizer, of her union and of the Storytelling Festival in Kennedy Grove The Jonesborough Festival just got too big, gigantic, mobs of people. The festival we started here in the early eighties attracts story-tellers from all over the U.S., but it’s still manageable.” This year’s festival, east of El Sobrante, at the foot of San Pablo Dam, is May 21 and 22, information at www.bayareastorytelling.org. 

Nancy reached another goal in 1993, reconnecting with her daughter, born when Nancy was in college and given up for adoption. 

“She’s a fiction writer and a software designer,” Nancy said. “She designed my website and came to one of our storytelling festivals. We’ve led some workshops together for adoptees and their parents, both adoptive and biological.” 

As Nancy goes on listing her current projects, I imagine a creative juggler keeping many balls in the air while relishing every tricky moment. In addition to writing songs and giving singing/storytelling performances for local schools and libraries, she still travels to conferences and workshops. I Will Be Your Friend (a song and activity book free to teachers from Tolerance.org) includes her “1492,” a song that reminds children that other peoples were here before Europeans came. She is helping to compile archival songs for a Malvina Reynolds Lyrics website. 

She has been recording songs written by herself, by her mother, and by others since 1982, starting with Plum Pudding, a record of songs and stories for children performed when she was part of the group, Plum City Players. A compilation CD of more recent songs she wrote with Candy Forest, Sun, Sun Shine: Songs for Curious Children, is available, along with information about her other activities at www.sisterschoice.com. 

“I’m still singing with the Freedom Song Network, which started back in 1982 with people getting together to share activist-political-freedom songs,” Nancy said. “We meet to sing old songs and try out new ones. It’s a loose bunch of people who are ‘on call’ to sing at demonstrations, on picket lines like the Claremont Hotel strike. People call us every month or so, and whoever can make it shows up. Of course, for a big peace march or demonstration, no one has to call us; everyone’s there.”  

Another current project is singing with the Threshold Choir, founded by Kate Munger in 2000, and soon inspiring similar groups in Bay Area counties and beyond. The Threshold Choir offers songs, often specially composed, sung a cappella by two to four people at the bedside of comatose and dying patients. 

“You have to choose songs carefully,” Nancy said. “People who are very near death can’t take even quiet polyphonic songs like our Saint Francis Prayer (‘Make me an instrument of your peace—’), set as a round. For them a pure unison line works best.” 

The songs on the CD Listening at the Threshold, recorded live in the tunnel at the Marin Headlands, have spiritual, non-sectarian titles like “By Love Alone” and “It’s All Right,” and are uniformly mellow and calming. For more information on this CD (which includes one of Nancy’s songs) and on the founding of the choir go to www.thresholdchoir.org. 

“Of course,” Nancy said, “we take requests, and a conscious person or a family member might ask for some old favorites. Recently I was called to Alta Bates to sing old lefty songs for a Jewish woman who was dying. I also sang her a Yiddish lullaby I’d learned from my mother. Her son really appreciated that.”  

Nancy’s voice, like her mother’s, is soft, with little resonance, but a surprisingly wide range, an unpretentious “ordinary” voice that encourages you to forget your inhibitions and sing along. She takes satisfaction in that fact, but takes even more pleasure in her ability to write a song with an important message in a style so simple that everyone gets the tune and the words right away. “I like it when a child hears a couple of verses of a new song, and then begins to sing along with the refrain on the next verse,” she said. 

Nancy will celebrate her 70th birthday on Saturday night, March 12, at Freight and Salvage. It’s a benefit concert for Freight and Salvage as well as for the Threshold Choir and the Freedom Song Network. “We’ll all be performing,” Nancy said, “the Plum City Players, Candy, Judy, and my daughter.” 

Details at www.sisterschoice.com. Tickets at the door or at www.thefreight.org.º