Farewell to MotherJudge, Albany's music mom

Introducing her song "High Hopes" during a set at the 2013 Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in the Catskills, Caroline "MotherJudge" Isachsen told the crowd, "This is one of our own songs. We love it 'cause it's different."

The tune, irresistibly head-bobbing, bounces along, at once seemingly familiar and yet utterly itself. It has distinctive rhythmic and lyrical stresses as well as significant vocal jumps, including when Isachsen sings the first word of the title in her throaty contralto, then immediately floats out a breathy "hopes" on a note that's up one full octave.

"When I first heard it, I thought maybe it was somebody else's song from the '50s, '60, '70s. It's that timeless," said Mitch Elrod, a close musical associate of MotherJudge's in Albany for many years. "But once you got to know her, you knew it couldn't be anybody else's song but hers." It also showcases her voice, which, as Elrod described it, "could go from quiet passages to blowing the back roof off the place."

Isachsen, who under her stage name MotherJudge entertained audiences and inspired fellow musicians for more than 30 years as a singer, songwriter, mentor and open-mic host, died Saturday from pancreatic cancer. It was three weeks before what would have been her 57th birthday.

Music fans and performers alike had been expecting — dreading — news of her death since the night in January when Isachsen informed the crowd at McGeary's pub in downtown Albany, where she hosted the Best Damn Open Mic Ever on Wednesdays for almost nine years, that she had pancreatic cancer. The disease is often swift and terrible: Only 20 percent of patients survive a year after diagnosis, according to the Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, and just 3 percent last five years.

Isachsen died two months to the day after she told the McGeary's audience...