“Banjo Pickin’ Girl” is a traditional song with variants found across the Kentucky mountains. It reached records early — an Emry Arthur recording appeared in 1929 — but the version that fixed it in memory came in 1938 from Lily May Ledford and the Coon Creek Girls, one of the first all-female string bands, assembled for John Lair’s Renfro Valley radio shows.
Ledford gave the old song a particular spirit: her verses follow a young woman traveling the world over — to China, to Italy — carrying her banjo and playing for anyone who will listen. In an era when professional music-making was largely closed to women, that image of a banjo-picking girl going wherever she pleased carried real charge.
Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, themselves pioneers among women in bluegrass and old-time music, recorded “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” on their 1976 album. The choice was a deliberate nod to a lineage of women instrumentalists, and their version helped keep the song current.
