Ronnie Gilbert

Ronnie Gilbert
Gilbert in August 2006
Background information
Birth name	Ruth Alice Gilbert
Born	(1926-09-07)September 7, 1926 Brooklyn, New York, New York, U.S.
Died	June 6, 2015(2015-06-06) (aged 88) Mill Valley, California, U.S.
Genres	American folk music, Protest music, Americana
Occupation(s)	Musician, songwriter, actress
Associated acts	The Weavers Pete Seeger The Almanac Singers Arlo Guthrie Woody Guthrie Holly Near Lead Belly

Ruth Alice "Ronnie" Gilbert (September 7, 1926 – June 6, 2015) was an American folk singer, songwriter, actress and political activist. She was one of the original members of the music quartet the Weavers, as a contralto with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman.

Gilbert was born in Brooklyn, New York City and considered herself a native New Yorker her whole life. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mother, Sarah, came from Warsaw, Poland and was a dressmaker and trade unionist, and her father, Charles Gilbert, came from Ukraine and was a factory worker.

Gilbert came to Washington, D.C., during World War II. She encountered Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie and other folk singers. She went to Anacostia High School. She was almost expelled because of her resistance to participating in a minstrel show. She performed in the early 1940s with the Priority Ramblers before founding the Weavers with Pete Seeger.

Gilbert's singing was characterized as "a crystalline, bold contralto."

Her voice is heard, blending with and rising over the others, in Weavers tracks such as “This Land Is Your Land”, “If I Had a Hammer”, “On Top of Old Smoky”, “Goodnight, Irene”, “Kisses Sweeter than Wine”, and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena”.

The Weavers were an influential folk-singing group that was blacklisted in the early 1950s, during a period of widespread anti-communist feeling, because of the group's left-wing sympathies. Following the Weavers' dissolution in 1953 due to the blacklist, she continued her activism on a personal level, traveling to Cuba in 1961 on a trip that brought her back to the United States on the same day that country banned travel to Cuba. She also participated in the Parisian protests of 1968 after traveling to that country to work with British theatrical director Peter Brook. In the 1970s, Gilbert earned an MA in clinical psychology and worked as a therapist for a few years.