A Santa Barbara native who was a leading figure in the folk music boom of the 1960s, Julie Felix was more than just a singer and songwriter. Inspired by the Beat Generation novel On the Rock, aged 24 she set off on a hitchhiking adventure through Europe, fortuitously meeting poet Leonard Cohen, becoming the girlfriend of Beatles vocalist Paul McCartney, and singing the songs of Bob Dylan.
“Fate whisked me along,” she said recently looking back on her international music career spanning more than half a century. In the United Kingdom she became a household name, TV star and Top 20 recording artist. While she gained more accolades on the other side of the Atlantic, including being heralded as “Britain’s leading lady of folk” by The Times, and spent most of the last decades living in Europe, she remained proud of her American Rivera upbringing.
Born on June 14, 1938 in Santa Barbara, she gained her love of music and connection to the land from her parents, who both had Native American blood. Her mother, an American with Welsh heritage, often sang the ballads of Burl Ives, while her father was a Mexican mariachi ensemble musician who played guitar and accordion. Her father sometimes would sing Mexican songs into the early hours of the morning. By age seven she had written her first song, about pixies.