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NY Times, June 2 2015
Jean Ritchie, Who Revived Appalachian Folk Songs, Dies at 92
By MARGALIT FOX
Jean Ritchie, who brought hundreds of traditional songs from her native
Appalachia to a wide audience — singing of faith and unfaithfulness,
murder and revenge, love unrequited and love lost — and in the process
helped ignite the folk song revival of the mid-20th century, died on
Monday at her home in Berea, Ky. She was 92.
Her niece Judy Hudson confirmed the death.
The youngest of 14 children in a farming family from Viper, Ky., Ms.
Ritchie was a vital link in a chain of oral tradition that stretched
back centuries. Her recordings and concerts — she appeared on some of
the world’s celebrated stages, including Carnegie Hall in New York and
the Royal Albert Hall in London — helped keep the music alive for an
international listenership.
Over the years Ms. Ritchie performed jointly with some of the best-known
names in folk music, including Pete Seeger and Doc Watson. She was
closely associated with the Newport Folk Festival, performing at its
inception in 1959 and many times afterward.
With her flowing red hair and modest dress, Ms. Ritchie had a quietly
striking stage presence. Hers was not a trained voice, but it was a
splendidly traditional one: high, sweet, lyrical and plaintive,
accompanied by the Appalachian fretted dulcimer she had learned to play
as a girl.
As a result of having brought a dulcimer with her when she moved to New
York in the late 1940s, Ms. Ritchie is credited with almost
single-handedly reviving interest in that instrument, which is held in
the lap and plucked with one hand. For about a decade, starting in the
early 1960s, she and her husband, George Pickow, ran a small
dulcimer-making business beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn.
By the time she left Kentucky, Ms. Ritchie had learned more than 300
songs by osmosis, many of them old ballads like “Barbara Allen” and
“Lord Randall” that had been carried to Appalachia by settlers from the
British Isles. She became a collector of folk songs and an authority on
their origin, performance practice and regional variants.
She also wrote original songs (among the best known is “Black Waters,”
denouncing Kentucky strip-mining), which have been covered by artists
including Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and the alternative folk singer
Michelle Shocked.
Early on, as Ms. Ritchie explained in interviews, she wrote her most
adamantly political compositions under a pseudonym, so as not to vex her
adamantly apolitical mother.
The youngest child of Balis Ritchie and the former Abigail Hall, Jean
Ruth Ritchie was born on Dec. 8, 1922, in Viper, then a village of 15 or
20 houses in the foothills of the Cumberlands.
“To stand in the bottom of any of the valleys is to have the feeling of
being down in the center of a great round cup,” she wrote in her
memoir-cum-songbook, “Singing Family of the Cumberlands” (1955),
illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
Ms. Ritchie continued: “Travelers from the level lands, usually the Blue
Grass section of Kentucky to the west of us, always complained that they
felt hemmed in by our hills, cut off from the wide skies and the rest of
the world. For us it was hard to believe there was any ‘rest of the
world,’ and if there should be such a thing, why, we trusted in the
mountains to protect us from it.”
Song was woven seamlessly into every aspect of the Ritchies’ daily life.
They sang when they played games, when they churned butter and hoed
corn. They sang when they courted, when they married and when they
rocked babies to sleep.
Ms. Ritchie earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from the
University of Kentucky in 1946 and afterward moved to New York, where
she worked at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. There,
she routinely calmed the urban street children in her care with songs
from the Cumberlands, which, with their haunting modal melodies and
tales of simple pastimes, were so alien as to stun her young charges
into submission.
But it wasn’t until Ms. Ritchie began to sing those songs at parties and
“people who should know made a great fuss over them,” as she told The
New York Times in 1952, that she realized they were anything out of the
ordinary. She became a fixture on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse
scene and was heard often on the singer Oscar Brand’s “Folksong
Festival,” broadcast then as now on WNYC radio in New York.
In the late 1940s, Ms. Ritchie’s work caught the ear of the folklorist
Alan Lomax, who recorded her for the Archive of Folk Song, part of the
Library of Congress. It also caught the ear of the conductor and record
producer Mitch Miller, who arranged a contract with Elektra Records. Her
first solo album, “Jean Ritchie Singing the Traditional Songs of Her
Kentucky Mountain Family,” was released in 1952.
That year, Ms. Ritchie received a Fulbright scholarship that enabled her
to travel to Britain to study the roots of her family’s songs. Her other
honors include, in 2002, a National Heritage Fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts, considered the nation’s highest award
in the traditional arts.
She was the subject of a documentary film, “Mountain Born: The Jean
Ritchie Story,” which was made in 1996 for Kentucky Educational
Television and is available on video.
Among her other albums are “Mountain Born,” “None but One,” “The Most
Dulcimer,” “Child Ballads in America” and “Marching Across the Green
Grass.” She and Mr. Pickow released, or rereleased, many albums on their
own label, Greenhays Recordings.
Her other books include “The Swapping Song Book” (1952), “The Dulcimer
Book” (1963) and “Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians.”
Mr. Pickow, whom Ms. Ritchie married in 1950, died in 2010; not long
afterward, she returned to Kentucky from their home in Port Washington,
on Long Island. Her survivors include a brother, Balis Wilmer Ritchie;
and two sons, Jon and Peter Pickow.
As a college student, Ms. Ritchie took a few voice lessons, her only
formal instruction. Her father, hearing her sing the old songs with her
newfound classical technique, inquired whether she was ill.
Ms. Ritchie quickly went back, as she later said, to “ ‘decorating’ a
song with shakes and quivers in the old way, shaking up a note and
quivering down.”
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