Juliane Werding: Multifaceted Folk Star & Earth Mother

Juliane Werding circa 1982

It seems folk singers are alike around the world -- moody, leftist in their politics and susceptible to offbeat mysticism and food and health oddities.

Germany's premier folk artist, Juliane Werding is no exception. After all, she made her first big splash with a song popularized by Joan Baez.

Over her 37 year career (she says she's temporarily retired as of 2009) the contemplative Essen native has churned out an astonishing 22 albums -- many of them gold -- won a mantle full of German music awards and sold out famed Berlin Friedrichstadt Palace twice, as late as 2000.

She is multifaceted, if ever there was an artist who could lay claim to that term. Werding has written scores of her own songs, published four books on health and religious topics and practiced as a homeopathic medical professional. (Homeopathy is much more accepted as a medical form in Germany than in the US and since 1939, during Adolf Hitler's National Socialist regime,its practice has been sanctioned and licensed by the German Governments.)

Juliane Werding came to attention as a 15 year old performing her folk music on SWF broadcasting and was immediately signed to a record contract.

A mere one year later in 1972, she hit the top of the German charts with Am Tag als Conny Kramer starb, a Germanized cover of the Band's 1968 American hit, later covered by Baez, The Night They Rolled Old Dixie Down. That disc stayed in the top ten in Germany for 14 weeks and sold over a million copies.

Juliane Werding today practicing
homeopathic medicine in Munich

In the ensuing years, despite time off for marriage to a theologian and childbearing, she churned out 22 albums, the last in 2008.

Like the quintessential leftist folkie Baez, she has embraced radical feminism (performing onstage in The Vagina Monologues) and environmental extremism. She told an interviewer in the German Kultur-Base.de that she supports the redistributionist Kyoto treaties and opposes man's "predatory exploitation of nature."

Since her tentative retirement announcement in 2009, Werding has reportedly devoted her full time to her herbal-based homeopathic medical practice in Munich, her home of the past 30 years.

Here Werding performs her 1994 cover of Roy Orbison's You've Got It in its Germanized form as Du schaffst es:



Here is Juliane Werding performing her breakthrough hit, Am Tag als Conny Kramer starb, a Germanized version of the American folk hit about the War Between the States, The Night They Rolled Old Dixie Down: