JEAN RITCHIE ~ AN AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC LEGEND
______________________________________
Submitted by: Cecile Johnson
Jean Ritchie was the youngest of 14 children born to Balis and Abigail Ritchie in 1922 in the small mountain town of Viper, Kentucky. Her family were poor farmers, but what they lacked in money they made up for in the beauty of their music. Their Scot-Irish heritage was rich in songs sung by generations of mountain people who were tucked away from the world in the remote hollows and valleys of Appalachia. Her family farmed the steep mountain land and spent the evenings singing ballads on the front porch for their own entertainment.
In the early days of her upbringing, she was encouraged to sing along with the entire family. Her Dad eventually taught her how to play the mountain or lap plucked dulcimer after he heard her trying to pick out the tune of 'Go Tell Aunt Rhody.' She strummed the strings with a turkey quill and learned to sing one melody while she played a countermelody on the dulcimer thus creating a duet with herself. Playing the dulcimer along with her rich repertoire of songs would distinguish her from all other folk singers of the time. Jean learned all the sad old English ballads that her ancestors brought with them to ‘The New World.’ She learned made-up songs as all the Ritchie children played and did the daily chores. She learned the old hymns and spirituals sung at the little wooden ‘Regular Baptist’ church down the road in Jeff, Kentucky and all the instrumental dances, reels and jigs sung at weddings and ice cream socials. Even at such a young age she had a repertoire of over 300 songs.
In the late forties, the family acquired a radio and discovered that they were singing “hillbilly” music, a word they had never heard before. She went to college (a rare thing for a woman of the mountains in the 30s) attending Cumberland Junior College in Williamsburg, Kentucky. She eventually attended the University of Kentucky graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1946. She earned a bachelor’s degree in social work and moved to New York City to work at the Henry Street Settlement School as a social worker. She used her family songs to entertain the children in her charge. Gradually her reputation as a folksinger grew and she began to keep a more active performance schedule on radio, television, in concerts, folk festivals, and hootenannies. While in New York, she also met folk music collector Alan Lomax, who recognized the importance of the music from rural Kentucky that Jean Ritchie was willing to share. He recorded her songs for the Library of Congress and she went on to meet other important musicians of the time including Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Jean also wrote her own songs and became known for creating variants of songs in which she would alter tunes from one verse to another in a song and change lyrics from one performance to the next. She often created new songs from using bits of material from existing ones and adding new song fragments that she recalled from her childhood. Her original music has been recorded by countless country and folk performers including Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, the Judds and the Johnson Mountain Boys. Judy Collins recorded her traditional songs 'Tender Ladies' and 'Pretty Saro' and used a photograph of her husband’s George Pickow on the cover of her album 'Golden Apples of the Sun.'
Ritchie has been married to photographer George Pickow since 1950. Pickow’s uncle set up a workshop under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. George did the wood finishing work and Jean the tuning. They sold more than 300 dulcimers. Today, dulcimers can be found at many folk festivals and craft fairs. In 1952, Jean Ritchie received a Fulbright Scholarship. She and her husband traveled to the European and British Isles countryside collecting the songs related to her own family songs: especially those ballads and songs that her ancestors brought with them to the mountains of Kentucky from their home in the hills of Scotland. She spent 18 months tape recording and interviewing the individual singers. Her husband photographed the trip. She recorded her first solo album “Jean Ritchie Sings” and released some of the UK recordings under the name “Field Trip.” Later, released in 2001 on the Ritchie’s own Greenhays recording label, are recordings of the Irish performers they taped along side by side with the Ritchie family versions of the same songs.
By 1955 she had written her first of many books, an autobiography entitled Singing Family of the Cumberlands. She also recorded several more albums including “Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family,” “A Time for Singing,” “The Most Dulcimer” and “None But One.” They have two sons, Peter born in 1954 and Jonathan born in 1958. Both have performed and recorded with their mother and help with the family business and website.
She and Pickow have lived in Port Washington, New York for nearly 50 years, but she remains perhaps the most well-known of traditional singers of Kentucky and has stayed true to her musical family roots. A PBS documentary of her life called “Mountain Born: The Jean Ritchie Story” was produced for Kentucky Educational Television in 1995. In 2002 she received the National Heritage Fellowship Award, the country’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. She has become known as “The Mother of Folk” with performances at Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall and many local and state folk festivals and revivals.
Her purity of voice and line in her story-telling songs transcend the hundreds of years represented in the old ballads of England, Scotland and Ireland that have become her own family’s American musical heritage and our own. I have learned much from her in my own work. I enjoy sharing her songs with the children and cherish the legacy that she has left us in her music.
Cecile Johnson
OAKE Southern Division President
cjohnson2@dentonisd.org
1-940-369-4543 (W) 1-940-382-1614(H)
Music specialist
Woodrow Wilson Elementary
Denton, TX
Contributed by: Cecile Johnson