Linda Louise Yudell James

Ms. James was 73. She was diagnosed about two years ago with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Her survivors include her husband Roger of Vestavia Hills; a daughter, Sarah James Lindsey (Eben) and two grandsons, Harold and Charlie, all of Santa Cruz, Calif.; a sister, Janice Yudell of Venice, Calif., and several nieces and nephews.

Born in Chicago on Valentine’s Day, 1953, Linda was the youngest of three children, and grew up in the North Shore town of Wilmette. Friends she made during her Wilmette years remained friends until her death, as did others elsewhere, including Birmingham, where she spent most of her adult years. Her parents were Valerie and Charles Yudell, both of them certified public accountants. Charles Yudell, whose original last name was Yudelowitz, was one of three orphaned brothers who, in 1905, emigrated to the U.S. from Libau, now known as Liepaja in Latvia, at that time a territory in the Russian Empire.

Linda’s parents preached and practiced common sense, practicality, staying unburdened by debt, and being open to the opportunity to be generous with others. Linda took those values to heart, her outlook being, If you enjoy something, someone else will probably enjoy it as well, so bring them in on it. For her, “it” would become dancing and singing in different styles, learning the basics of glass-blowing, sharing a Chicago-style pizza, discovering a new jazz musician, or knitting shawls for hospice patients.

She was direct in her speech – for some, that took some getting used to - and striking in her appearance. More than a few people recall being struck by her shoulder-length silver hair, dark eyebrows, expressive eyes, and cleverly conceived seasonal dance wear and Halloween costumes.

It’s a cruel irony that an incurable, dreadfully debilitating disease started in her feet, which by then had made enough dance steps to circle the globe.

After high school, Linda attended Northern Illinois University, majoring in music education. At NIU, she met Roger James, already a talented violinist and a music performance major. Both were in the same music history class. There was a “Hi” from her in a hallway, another “Hi” and then a date on Nov. 17, 1973. First, there was a vegetarian dinner of mac and cheese, steamed carrots and salad at Roger’s place, a meal they would have on every anniversary of that first date. Then they went to hear some polka music at a local bar named Andy’s Tap.

Linda knew the basics of ballroom dancing. She also knew polka. At Andy’s Tap, telling Roger that polka was fun, she pulled him out on the dance floor.

They married Sept. 2, 1978, in Linda’s backyard. Linda wore a wide-brimmed wedding hat, trimmed with lace, borrowed from her lifelong friend Rickie Crown. Then they were off to Sioux Falls, S.D., for the next seven years. Roger was a founding member of the Dakota String Quartet, and the players in that quartet were principal members of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. Armed with her music ed degree, Linda worked as a teacher’s aide in a local high school band program. She also gave birth to daughter Sarah.

In 1985, the small family moved south when Roger successfully auditioned for the first violin section of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in Birmingham. Neither he nor Linda had ever been to Alabama. No family there. It was a long way from Chicago. While the ASO was full of musicians from around the U.S. and other countries, Linda’s first job in the IRA department of City Federal Savings & Loan brought her in touch with Deep South accents and attitudes she had never encountered before.

Perhaps because of the accounting genes she inherited from her parents, Linda proved to be a quick study on various aspects of banking. While working at Regions Bank, she became an accounting officer and, ever the teacher, visited some of the big bank’s small acquisitions to help them adjust to the Regions system.

With time, she also found a life-changing niche, an ever-widening circle of friends, and became a teacher and advocate for Cajun, zydeco, and, particularly, contra dancing. About seven years after settling in Birmingham, she and Roger took a friend’s advice to try out contra dancing one night in Bluff Park. Once they did that, they never looked back, and then they took Cajun and zydeco classes. With contra dancing, Linda became a devoted member of Birmingham Friends of Old-Time Music and Dance (Footmad), the entity that organizes local dances and an annual contra dance weekend in Mentone.

To the timid trying the dance for the first time, she would say, “If you can walk, you can contra.”

As part of the contra community, Linda and Roger found a community of friends, with whom they had much in common. Each friendship was a reason to stay, grow and make a mark. Others beyond that contra community were friends as well, and were among the recipients of Christmas cookies (from a recipe from Linda’s grandmother Elsie) that Linda and Roger would annually deliver in a wide radius. (They were still doing that during the last Christmas season.)

It depends on where you went and what you liked, but one could be tempted to say if people did not know Linda, they had heard about her, or had noticed her. People might have spotted her exuberantly dancing throughout Birmingham’s beloved City Stages music festival or noticed her singing with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus. Or they might have been around when she strapped on an accordion and Roger took out his mandolin, whereupon the two would perform as the one and only J-Dots.

Others would have heard her voice when she called hospice patients during her lunch break while working for a financial services firm. Or they might have received one of the hundreds of prayer shawls that she knitted for hospice patients, a labor of love she continued until the last few months of her life.

Again, on matters artistic, she would be fully involved, bringing a joy and creativity that people are missing and finding hard to replace. With Footmad, she wrote the newsletters, did promos and announcements, and formed a team of paper snowflake-makers to decorate the dance hall for New Year’s Eve. For the Mentone dance weekend, which she loved and touted whenever she had the chance, she would print out photos to illustrate the dance weekend’s theme, then paste faces of dancers on one of the personalities featured in each photo. Those photos, in turn, would adorn the dance and dining halls and be souvenirs of the weekend. In 2024, at the last Mentone dance weekend she was able to attend, she wore a space helmet in keeping with the weekend’s “Star Trek” theme and gamely made her way to the microphone to do announcements.

Linda also put to use her decorative flair during Birmingham’s annual Day of the Dead festival, volunteering to decorate porta potties with the names and faces of famous Dead Johns, such as Wayne or Belushi. For that work, someone dubbed her the Crapper Queen.

One of her final wishes was to donate her body to an ALS study now underway at UAB.

“That was her final contribution to the world,” her daughter Sarah said, “and I just think that is so fitting that that was how she chose to go out …, helping others.”

A celebration of her life is scheduled for 1 pm on Nov. 17 at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. In lieu of flowers, the James family suggests people can donate to ALS research, the UAB Department of Neurology, or entities that promote the arts, scientific research, and joyful human expression.