KY soprano who worked with John Jacob Niles, had connection to Thomas Merton, dies
Jacqueline Roberts, a Kentucky-born soprano — who collaborated with composer and folk balladeer John Jacob Niles, working with him as he set poetry by Trappist monk Thomas Merton to music — has died.
Roberts, 92, a former resident of Gratz Park in Lexington, died March 3 in Gainesville, Fla., according to her obituary.
Roberts was a member of the music department faculty at Eastern Kentucky University and Asbury College and taught voice lessons privately as well.
But her work with Niles, who she met in 1967, defined her career.
She worked with Niles for 17 years.
“We just clicked,” Roberts said in a 2001 Herald-Leader article. “He liked a singer who was very expressive to tell a song’s story. And I seemed to have the kind of voice he wanted.”
Roberts and an accompanist rehearsed with Niles at Boot Hill Farm, his home near Athens, twice a week, and they performed at parties he and his wife, Rena, hosted, she told Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen in 2012.
For a decade, Roberts traveled with the couple as they performed concerts throughout the country, and when Niles was setting Merton’s poetry to music, it was Roberts’ voice he was thinking of.
Shortly before his untimely death in 1968, Merton visited Boot Hill, which sits on the Fayette-Clark County line, and heard Roberts sing an early version of what became the Niles-Merton Song Cycle.
Roberts later recalled seeing tears in Merton’s eyes as she sang.
Merton wrote of that day: “I do think John Niles has brought out a lot of what I wanted to say and made me value my own poems more ... and I burst into tears at Jackie’s singing. ”
Ron Pen, who directs the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky and has written a biography of Niles, told Eblen those art songs Niles composed “are some of the strongest songs of his life. And they were written specifically with Jackie Roberts’ voice in mind.”
“Occasionally, throughout history, a few composers have been able to collaborate with a performer in a special way, to have the luxury of trying out material and writing for a specific voice,” Pen said in 2012. “This was one of those relationships.”
After his death in 1980 at age 87, Roberts continued to give performances of Niles’ music at college campuses and in other venues.
In 2001, Roberts published a memoir of her experiences, “A Journey with John Jacob Niles: A Memoir of My Years with Johnnie.”
Gay Reading, a longtime friend of the Niles family, said Roberts “was a real artist, and Johnnie, who was picky as hell, recognized it.”
Reading recalled Roberts as “very charming, sweet, natural, humble, bubbly. She and her husband, Helm, just had a beautiful family.”
Roberts, whose maiden name was Warnick, grew up in Russell performing with the Warnick Family Band from the age of five, according to her obituary. She was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
After marrying fellow Russell Countian, Helm Roberts, the couple pursued master’s degrees at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, then briefly moved to Los Angeles, where she sang with the Roger Wagner Chorale, her obituary stated.
She was married to the late Helm Roberts, an architect and city planner who designed the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Frankfort. They were married for 55 years and had two sons, Bruce and John.
Reading said one of his favorite memories of Roberts came from when he was serving in the U.S. infantry in Vietnam.
For his birthday, he said Niles and Roberts performed a concert.
“Jackie’s husband recorded it, and they sent it to me in Vietnam,” Reading said. “I’d been carrying it around in the jungle for a few days.”
Reading said that when he got back to the boat where he was stationed, he put the little reel-to-reel tape in the player he shared with the guys in his squad.
And from half a world away came Roberts’ voice, singing Niles’ “For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943” and “The Greek Women.”
“I burst into tears,” he said. “It was the voice of a friend.”
A graveside service for Roberts is scheduled for 11 a.m. June 6 at Lexington Cemetery.
