Judy Henske, Queen of the Beatniks

“If Linda Ronstadt is a torch singer, Judy Henske is a flame thrower.” from the crime novel Blue Belle by Andrew Vachs (1988)

Judy Henske is a one woman riot in cell block number 10. She's got a killer voice. She's funny. She dated Bob Dylan. As for the “Beatnik” moniker - LA producer Jack Nietschke styled her as "Queen of the Beatniks" and the name stuck. She's from Chippewa Falls - home of the first Cray supercomputer and Leinenkugels Beer. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1960, right in the middle of the folk music boom and embarked on a show biz career. She was a member of the folk super group The Whiskey Hill Singers, appeared on The Judy Garland Show and could be seen on ABC TV's short-lived weekly folk showcase, Hootenanny! In the feature film HOOTENANNY HOOT, MGM's 1963 attempt to cash in on the folk music craze, she owns the film by singing a centuries old murder ballad in a bikini. When folk music ebbed, Judy soldiered on into the changing musical landscape. Her live records show her off as a complete entertainer: the kind who can sing and banter with an audience in an intimate cabaret setting. For better or worse, she's always been impossible to package or categorize. She lived her show biz life as a one-off, unique and impossible to replicate. In the early oughts, Rhino Handmade Records issued a great retrospective of her career, Judy Henske, How Far This Music Goes 1962 -2004.