Alice Gerrard

She was born in Seattle on 8 July 1934. Her mother and aunts had studied classical music and toured as the Symphony Sisters Quartette, and her English-born father was a choir director, so music was something the family did at home. After her father died, when she was nine, the family spent a year in Guadalajara, Mexico, and then settled in and around Oakland, California. In 1953 she enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she met Jeremy Foster, a folk musician from the Washington area whose high-school friends included Mike Seeger. He introduced her to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and she soon began learning guitar and banjo.

They married in 1956 and moved to the Washington area on an Antioch work-study program. There Foster renewed his friendship with Seeger, who by then knew the West Virginia-born singer Hazel Dickens, and the group of friends spent Sundays at country music parks such as Sunset Park, New River Ranch and Watermelon Park, picking and sharing picnic dinners with Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and others. Back at Antioch after Foster’s Army service, the couple formed a band and persuaded the college folksong society to put on what are recognized as the first college concerts of bluegrass: the Osborne Brothers on 5 March 1960 and the Stanley Brothers on 14 May. In 1962 Gerrard and Dickens played together at the Galax Fiddlers’ Convention.

After Foster graduated the family moved back to Washington, and Gerrard began working up a duet with Dickens. At the urging of David Grisman and Peter Siegel the two sent an audition tape to Moe Asch at Folkways. Production of their first album was under way in 1964 when Foster was killed in a car accident on his way to work, leaving her with four children, but she carried on with the partnership. Who’s That Knocking? came out on Verve/Folkways in 1965, with Gerrard, then recording as Alice Foster, singing lead on most of it and playing guitar, and it was followed by Won’t You Come & Sing for Me (Folkways, 1973), Hazel & Alice (Rounder, 1973) and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (Rounder, 1976), which includes her own “Mama’s Gonna Stay.” The duo played Bean Blossom and Newport and toured the South with Anne Romaine’s Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project.

Alongside the duo she worked on the new Bluegrass Unlimited magazine from its start in 1966 and wrote half a dozen articles for it. With Dickens, Seeger, Tracy Schwarz and Lamar Grier she sang in the Strange Creek Singers, who made one album for Arhoolie. In September 1968 she and Dickens interviewed Bill Monroe about the gospel songs he had recorded in the 1950s, and she and Ralph Rinzler wrote the notes for the resulting Decca reissue, A Voice from On High; at the 1969 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife she co-presented a concert and panel with Bill, Charlie, Birch and Bertha Monroe. She married Mike Seeger in 1970, and the two recorded together: a live 1970 concert in Japan issued by King, and Alice Gerrard & Mike Seeger (Greenhays, 1980). By 1976 she and Dickens had grown apart musically, and the duo stopped performing.

In the early 1980s she moved to Galax, Virginia, and became part of its music scene, playing with the old-time banjo players Andy Cahan and Enoch Rutherford and in a bluegrass band with Otis Burris, James Lindsey, Eldridge Montgomery and Wendell Cockerham, and helping older musicians get bookings at festivals. She championed the fiddler Tommy Jarrell, co-producing and appearing in Les Blank’s 1983 documentary about him, Sprout Wings and Fly, and helping him to a National Heritage Fellowship in 1982. She also recorded with Matokie Slaughter’s Back Creek Buddies (Saro, 1990). In 1987 she founded the Old-Time Herald, modeled on her work at Bluegrass Unlimited, and the non-profit Old-Time Music Group that publishes it, and she was its editor-in-chief until 2003. From 1989 she began giving her collected recordings and papers, including the field recordings Foster and Seeger made in the 1950s and her own from the Galax years, to the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Her first solo album, Pieces of My Heart (Copper Creek, 1994), mixed old-time songs with her own. A Hazel and Alice reunion at MerleFest in 1996, where Gerrard also managed the Traditional Stage, led to occasional dates together, among them a West Coast tour in 1997 and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2010. From 1998 she recorded four albums as Tom, Brad & Alice with Tom Sauber and Brad Leftwich, and later ones with Gail Gillespie and Sharon Sandomirsky (The Road to Agate Hill, 2007), Beverly Smith, the Piedmont Melody Makers and Kay Justice. The IBMA gave her its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001. Her later solo albums are Calling Me Home: Songs of Love and Loss (Copper Creek, 2002), Bittersweet and the Grammy-nominated Follow the Music (Tompkins Square, 2014).

Kenny Dalsheimer’s documentary about her, You Gave Me a Song: The Life and Music of Alice Gerrard, came out in 2019. In 2023 she finished Sun to Sun for the Durham label Sleepy Cat, all original songs apart from one instrumental by Reed Stutz, with Tatiana Hargreaves and Phil Cook among the players, and in 2025 the University of North Carolina Press published her memoir, Custom Made Woman: A Life in Traditional Music. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at summer music camps such as the Augusta Heritage Center and the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington.

• 2001: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 2017: IBMA Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, with Hazel Dickens
• Also: Virginia Arts Commission Award; North Carolina Folklore Society’s Tommy Jarrell Award