Julie Felix was born in Santa Barbara, California on June 14th, 1938 into a spiritual background of mixed cultures. Her father was Mexican and her mother an American of Welsh ancestry, but both had American Indian blood in their veins which Julie feels deeply connected to. "The American Indian which I get through my mother and my father. This wonderful connection to the land." Her father, "an excellent musician", taught her how to play guitar, and at the age of seven she wrote her first song which she says was "about a pixie."
In her early twenties while working as a sports mistress at a school for mentally backward children she began a career in folk music, following in the liberal traditions of Pete Seeger and Tom Paxton rather than being part of the radical left. Her passion for folk songs had begun in her childhood through her father`s mexican guitar playing and her mother`s Burl Ives records. Her own music was very commercial for a folk singer and led to her becomming an early champion of the singer/songwriter movement. "I grew up listening to my father singing Mexican songs. I was helping someone run for office in High School and I wrote a song - Betsy Robert For Queen Of The Girls` League. It didn`t work out on the ukulele so I asked my father if I could use his guitar. Soon I started singing in coffee houses in Santa Barbara. A little guy used to come to those clubs. He was always asking me about guitar chords. He used to get on my nerves. His name was David Crosby."
In the early sixties at a time when many folk singers such as Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank were re-locating, she left her home in California inspired by Jack Kerouac`s book "On The Road" and hitched around Europe. "The feeling generated by that book was very much in the air, many people from my generation wanted to get out there and really experience life. Kerouac and the existentialist writers like Camus were an inspiration, although I still don`t know what `existentialist` really means! We wanted to know what it felt like to be hungry and out in the rain, meeting life head on." She had originally intended only to holiday on a Greek island in the Aegean with 1000 dollars that she had saved up, but after singing in local coffee bars for 30s. per night she managed to save up enough to hitch through Italy and France before heading for the Mediterranean island of Ibiza where she sang for six months. After spending time in Germany she finally settled in England in September 1964 and made her home there. "I took off for Greece in June 62, supposedly for three months, but I never went home, I came to Britain via France, Italy and Spain, singing in folk clubs and even army bases... I love the climate in California, but I hate Los Angeles. I still have a US passport as well as a UK one, which means I can miss the queues at both ends! What I like about Europe is that you can just pop over to Holland or Spain and there`s so much diversity and cultural richness and everywhere is so close. Britain is great because, despite the fact that we supported Bush during the Iraqi conflict, which I strongly disapproved of, we could still obtain independent information in this country. That just doesn`t happen in the States. What Bush says is seen as more or less gospel." She signed a record deal with Decca, making her the first solo folk artist to be singed to a major British label, and was procalimed "Britain`s Leading Lady of Folk". Her first album "Julie Felix" an