Jean Ritchie
| Jean Ritchie | |
|---|---|
Jean Ritchie after a performance on April 26, 2008.
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| Born |
December 8, 1922 Viper, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Died | June 1, 2015 (aged 92) Berea, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Occupation | Singer-songwriter |
| Years active | 1948–2015 |
| Spouse(s) | George Pickow (1950–2010; his death); 2 children (Jonathan and Peter Pickow) |
Jean Ritchie (December 8, 1922 – June 1, 2015) was an American folk music singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player.
Jean Ritchie was born to Abigail (née Hall) and Balis W. Ritchie of Viper, an unincorporated community in Perry County in the Cumberland Mountains of south eastern Kentucky. The Ritchies of Perry County were one of the two "great ballad-singing families" of Kentucky celebrated among folk song scholars (the other was the Combs family of adjacent Knott County, whose repertoire formed the basis of the first scholarly work on the British ballads in America, a doctoral thesis by Professor Josiah Combs of Berea College for the Sorbonne University published in Paris in 1925.) In 1917, the great collector Cecil Sharp collected songs from Jean's older sisters Una and May. Many of the Ritchies attended the Hindman Settlement School, a folk school, where people were encouraged to cherish their own backgrounds and where Sharp also found many of his songs. Jean's father Balis had printed up a book of old songs entitled Lovers' Melodies, and music making was an important activity in the Ritchie home.
Jean's forebears had fought in the Revolutionary War in 1776 before settling in Kentucky, and most of them later fought on the Confederate Side in the Civil War. Her grandfather Justice Austin Ritchie was 2nd Lieutenant of Company C of the 13th Kentucky Confederate Cavalry. Alan Lomax wrote that:
They were quiet, thoughtful folks, who went in for ballads, big families and educating their children. Jean's grandmother was a prime mover in the Old Regular Baptist Church, and all the traditional hymn tunes came from her. Jean's Uncle Jason was a lawyer, who remembers the big ballads like "Lord Barnard." Jean's father taught school, printed a newspaper, fitted specs, farmed and sent ten of his fourteen children to college.
As the youngest of 14 siblings, Jean was one of ten girls who slept in one room of the farming family's farm house. She was quick to memorize songs and, with Chalmers and Velma McDaniels, performed at local dances and at county fairs, where they repeatedly won blue ribbons in Hazard, the county seat. Jean recalls that when the family acquired a radio in the late 1940s they discovered that what they had been singing was hillbilly music, a word they had never heard before.
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