Jean Ritchie

She was born Jean Ruth Ritchie on 8 December 1922 in Viper, Perry County, Kentucky, the youngest of the fourteen children of Balis and Abigail (Hall) Ritchie. The Ritchies were a singing family: they sang while they worked in the cornfield and around the house, and at gatherings on the porch, and the English collector Cecil Sharp had noted songs from her older sisters in 1917, five years before she was born. Her father kept a dulcimer, bought for five dollars from the Knott County maker Edward Thomas, on the mantelpiece and played dance music on it with a noter and a whittled feather quill. Nobody else was supposed to touch it, but at four or five she took it down while he was in the fields and taught herself, picking out the harmony against the songs she sang; when he realized who had been retuning it, he let her play and, when she was about seven, showed her a few things. She went to high school in Viper, studied at Cumberland College, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kentucky in 1946 with a degree in social work. That year she and her sisters Edna, Kitty and Pauline were recorded singing traditional songs by the collectors Mary Elizabeth Barnicle and Artus Moser.

Her first job was at the Henry Street Settlement on New York’s Lower East Side, where she taught Kentucky songs, ballads and singing games to children. In New York she met Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand and the folklorist Alan Lomax, who recorded hours of her songs, stories and dulcimer playing in 1949 and 1950 for the Library of Congress and arranged her first formal concert, at Columbia University. In 1948 she shared a hootenanny stage with the Weavers and Guthrie, and by October 1949 she was a regular guest on Brand’s Folksong Festival on WNYC. In 1950 she married the photographer and filmmaker George Pickow.

Elektra released her first album, Jean Ritchie Singing the Traditional Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family (EKLP 2), in 1952, with family versions of “The Cuckoo,” “The Gypsum Davy,” “Jubilee” and “The Little Devils.” The same year a Fulbright scholarship took her and Pickow to Britain and Ireland for about eighteen months to look for the older roots of her family’s songs. They recorded singers including Elizabeth Cronin and Seamus Ennis in Ireland, Jeannie Robertson in Aberdeen and Harry Cox in England, and in Devon worked with the collector Peter Kennedy to record Bill Westaway. While there she sang at the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s festival at the Royal Albert Hall and presented programs for the BBC. Some of the recordings came out on Field Trip (1954), set beside her own versions of the same songs, and more on the Folkways albums Field Trip – England (1959) and As I Roved Out (1960).

Her book Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955), illustrated by Maurice Sendak, told the story of her childhood through its songs and has stayed in print. Through the 1950s she recorded steadily: children’s songs and games, courting songs and riddle songs with Oscar Brand, and The Ritchie Family of Kentucky (1959), on which she interviewed her family. She sang at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and at the new campus festivals that followed, beginning at Berkeley. Folkways issued two volumes of British Traditional Ballads in the Southern Mountains in 1960, her family versions of Child ballads, which Smithsonian Folkways later put on a single CD in 2003.

In 1963 she recorded a live album at Folk City in Greenwich Village with the North Carolina guitarist Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City, which Folkways issued that year; Pickow recorded the show. The same year Oak Publications published her instruction book The Dulcimer Book, with her recollections of the instrument’s history in Perry and Knott counties and songs from the Ritchie family. The dulcimer itself became something of a family business: after Pickow made her one, the couple set up a workshop in Brooklyn with his uncle Morris Pickow, finishing and tuning instruments made in Kentucky, and soon sold some three hundred.

As the 1960s revival turned toward topical songs, she kept singing the traditional ballads but also began writing her own, using traditional melodies and forms to describe the damage that strip mining and logging did to eastern Kentucky. The first was “Black Waters,” about strip mining; “Blue Diamond Mines” took up mine safety. She published several of these under the pseudonym “Than Hall.” “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore” appeared on A Time for Singing (Warner Bros., 1965) and was recorded by Johnny Cash, Michelle Shocked, Kathy Mattea and Norman Blake; Mattea and Laurie Lewis also recorded “Black Waters.” Her hymn “Now Is the Cool of the Day,” about caring for the earth, was taken up by churches and choirs. Her Sire album Clear Waters Remembered (1969) gathered her own songs, among them “Blue Diamond Mines” and “West Virginia Mine Disaster.”

Her songs from the family tradition traveled too. “Nottamun Town,” which she had from her Uncle Jason, was recorded in Britain by Shirley Collins, Bert Jansch and Fairport Convention, and Bob Dylan used its melody for “Masters of War” in 1963. Judy Collins recorded her “Tender Ladies” and “Pretty Saro,” and Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris recorded her version of “My Dear Companion” on Trio in 1987.

None But One (Sire, 1977) won the critics’ award in Rolling Stone and reached a younger audience. She went on recording for her own Greenhays label and others, including High Hills and Mountains (1979), the hymn album Sweet Rivers (June Appal, 1981), The Most Dulcimer (1984), made because fans kept asking which of her albums had the most dulcimer, and Mountain Born (1995), with her sons Peter and Jonathan, who both performed and recorded with her. Kentucky Educational Television’s documentary Mountain Born: The Jean Ritchie Story followed in 1996. She performed until 2009, and in 2014 the double tribute album Dear Jean: Artists Celebrate Jean Ritchie featured Pete Seeger and Judy Collins. George Pickow died in 2010. Jean Ritchie died at her home in Berea, Kentucky, on 1 June 2015, at the age of 92.

• 1977: Rolling Stone critics’ award for None But One
• 2002: National Heritage Fellowship (the Bess Lomax Hawes fellowship), National Endowment for the Arts
• 2002: Kentucky Music Hall of Fame
• 2008: Long Island Music Hall of Fame