Nancy Tenney, wife of late Chicago folk singer Steve Goodman, dies at 78

In 1969, folk singer Steve Goodman stepped off stage at Chicago's famed Earl of Old Town pub and bumped into a cocktail waitress.

She was nearly a foot taller.

"Would you like to learn to dance?" he asked, doing a little jig amid the melting moment.

It was a kismet collision between Steve Goodman and Nancy Tenney (then known as Nancy Pruter).

A few weeks later, buoyed by the sudden capital infusion of a royalty check from an advertising jingle he'd composed, the two headed to O'Hare Airport to catch the first available flight to any place that was sunny, which turned out to be Houston.

After chatting with a couple of Hawaii-bound honeymooners on the flight, they changed their plans and made Houston a stopover en route to Maui. Days later, the couple made the 10,000-foot ascent to the top of a volcanic crater where they saw a rainbow that seemed divinely framed by the sun and moon.

"I guess after seeing that we've got to get married," Goodman said, according to family.

The couple wed in 1970. A few months later they were on a train headed south through Illinois to visit Mrs. Tenney's grandmother near Mattoon when she fell asleep, and Goodman, observing the passing world and life aboard the train, wrote the song "City of New Orleans."

The tune, which hit new heights when Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson covered it, was on Goodman's eponymous first album that came out in 1971. It also contained the track "Would You Like to Learn to Dance?" — a nod to meeting his wife.

Mrs. Tenney died April 6 of complications from dementia. She was 78.

The couple adopted a daughter, Jessie, and lived in an apartment three blocks west of Wrigley Field, where a Chicago Daily News reporter met them for an interview in 1973 and noted Mrs. Tenney's parting words to Goodman as he left for the day: "Stay with me — I love you."

Family said the two were wildly in love.

The story ran a few days before the release of Goodman's second album, "Somebody Else's Troubles." The album cover featured a photo of Goodman and Mrs. Tenney, along with their daughter and several musicians, including Jimmy Buffett and Goodman's good friend John Prine.

They had two more daughters and moved to Evanston and then California before Goodman died in 1984 at age 36 from leukemia — a disease he was diagnosed with at 19.

"I had nothing going for me before I met her. I was broke, I was out of school, I had no prospects. Anything good that has happened to me you can date from the time I met Nancy," Goodman told the Sun-Times in 1975.

"She's strong. She never once allowed me to feel sorry for myself, especially in the midst of getting away with actually doing nothing but playing a guitar for a living. She made me be as good as a musician as I could be and as good an entertainer as I could be," he said.

After her husband's death, Mrs. Tenney fulfilled her dream of becoming a nurse and later moved to New York City and earned a master's degree from Columbia University to become a family nurse practitioner.

"She was a widow who moved her three kids to New York and worked in an emergency room while she got her master's. ... She was a powerhouse," said their daughter Rosanna Goodman.

Mrs. Tenney volunteered weekly at a homeless mission in New York where one of her main focuses was tending to chronic foot problems.

"She was a helper of people," said Steve Goodman's brother, David Goodman.

In 1992 she married literary agent Craig Tenney. The couple later retired and moved to California.

Mrs. Tenney was born Sept. 21, 1946 in Jackman, Maine, to Hugo and Nancy Pruter. Her father was a minister. Her mother was a homemaker and librarian. She grew up in Maine and New Hampshire until her family moved to Illinois in 1951.

Mrs. Tenney graduated from Proviso East High School, where she had homeroom with classmate John Prine, whom she reconnected with years later when Prine and Goodman became pals.

"My mom wasn't close with her own family, so Steve's family took her in," Rosanna Goodman said.

"It's funny because she wasn't necessarily a folk fan. She loved my dad's music, but she was mostly into her Chicago blues," she said.

She protested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

"Her moral compass was very prominent, although she wasn't religious," said her daughter Sarah Goodman Voyer. "She expressed her opinions and was a straight shooter. She did not actually have a poker face."

One opinion she expressed when it came to attending Cubs games with Goodman, a Cubs fanatic: "If they can't settle their differences in nine innings, I don't have to stay any longer," David Goodman recalled with a laugh. (Steve Goodman famously wrote the fan anthem "Go, Cubs, Go.")

In addition to her two daughters, Mrs. Tenney is survived by her husband, Craig Tenney, and two grandchildren. Her daughter Jessie died in 2012.

Services have been held.