Ginny Hawker

She was born in southern Virginia. Her father, Ben Hawker, had sung all four parts with his brothers as the Hawker Brothers on WBTM radio, and he taught his daughters harmony by ear. As a child she went with him to her grandparents’ Primitive Baptist church near Danville, where the congregation sang slow hymns in unison with no instruments. When she was six the family moved to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, near Chincoteague, where she lived until she left for college.

In the 1970s, while living and working in Westminster, Maryland, she went to bluegrass festivals. A visit to the West Virginia State Folk Festival at Glenville in 1977 led her to move to Gilmer County, and she later served as the festival’s president from 1995 to 2005. She first went to the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins to hear Hazel Dickens, and with her father she then taught Primitive Baptist singing there for eight or ten years.

At Augusta in 1986 she met the singer Kay Justice. Their first album, Signs and Wonders, was recorded at the Appalshop studio in Whitesburg, Kentucky, on March 12–13, 1990, with Tracy Schwarz on fiddle, autoharp and second guitar. Come All You Tenderhearted followed on June Appal, recorded in March 1993 at Bob Read Studio in Charlottesville, Virginia, and then Bristol: A Tribute to the Music of the Original Carter Family (Copper Creek, 1999).

After Rounder’s head heard her sing with Dickens at a Folk Alliance conference, the label recorded the two with Carol Elizabeth Jones singing the high part. Heart of a Singer came out on Rounder in 1998. Her solo album Letters from My Father (Rounder, 2001), recorded at Trace Sound in Nashville in March 2001, has Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Ron Stewart, Dennis Crouch, Dirk Powell and Kenny Malone in the band.

With Tracy Schwarz, a former member of the New Lost City Ramblers, she made Good Songs for Hard Times (Copper Creek, 2000) and Draw Closer (Rounder, 2004), produced by Dirk Powell. They sang together until his death in March 2025. She has taught harmony singing and old-time country singing for years at Augusta, and for 2024–25 she took on the singer Mary Linscheid as an apprentice through the West Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program.