Melanie’s passing ran front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times both. As it should. I never knew her last name before, nor that her parents were Ukrainian and Italian.

I told my husband I was going to knit–and I’d wound up the now-dry hank and another one besides and was ready for it–but it was the purple cowl project I picked up, the other being too many strands to untangle if you move it around much. I sat back down at the computer.

That voice.

That intensity, that sincerity. Singing with Johnny Cash, talking to Johnny Carson. Clips of concert after concert.

What surprised me was how instantly the earlier ones took me back to more than just the music of that era: that beautiful velvety boho dress. Just one dress, in sleeves of orange and brown, silky, shimmery and substantial in the skirt, again and again, venue after venue. Clothes were expensive back then and all you have to do is look at closets in older houses to remember that people didn’t own a lot of them. If you wanted something for best you saved up for it first–and it would last.

She did tell Johnny Carson that she’d been told she had to get a new dress, a blue dress. She’d been told not to sing and not to bring her guitar while she was being interviewed.

Carson joked that they must have had the same publicist–and then he invited her to play that guitar.

She was wearing her favorite dress. It was not blue. She wore what she liked.

And then her voice sang her love to the world.