Marleen Calastorvi – Beltane Tapes
Marleen Calastorvi (189?-196?) was a prototypical Oregonian folk singer. Hailing from the township of Ashland, Oregon, she is regarded by many as the originator of the meandering wailer genre, once synonymous with the region. While little is known in fact about her life, she haunts the oral histories of the Rogue Valley, with encounters mentioned both in the “Southern Oregon Lesbian Land Communities Oral History Collection” and “Kay Atwood oral history collection” both maintained in the library of Southern Oregon University. She often appears as a preternatural character, with songs that both craft and foretell futures and appearances that shifted across genders and likenesses. Given her encounters with several of the rural lesbian intential communities of the 1960s along with the unusual timbre of her voice, she is speculated to have been queer both in sexuality and gender, which may explain her elusive life, given the politics of the time. Some credit her with being one of the first transgender women to make work as a performer in Southern Oregon.
Until 2022, no recordings of Marleen Calastorvi were thought to exist. However, during a routine cataloging of audio artifacts held in SOU’s special collections, a previously-undiscovered field recording was found with an attached handwritten label reading “M. Calastorvi — Beltane.” While the origins of the tapes are still unknown, with the university having no record of its donation nor how long it was held within their collections before this uncovering, the recordings are estimated to be circa 1950. Although there is no definitive way to attribute these to Marleen Calastorvi, the four songs released as a collection called “Beltane, Wolf Creek” are now believed to be the only surviving—and perhaps only ever—recordings of her music. They have been digitized, restored, and made publicly available through the generosity of Southern Oregon University and the Southern Oregon Society for the preservation of the Queer, Occult, and Strange (SOSQOS).