Folksinger, folksong collector, and composer. The youngest of fourteen children in a
farming family near Viper, Kentucky, Ritchie was educated like the others at the
Hindman Settlement School. There educators collected and taught ballads as part of
primary education. Her older sister Edna had, in fact, sung ballads for Cecil Sharp during
his 1916 visit to the school. Moving later to the Viper public high school and then to
Cumberland College, Jean Ritchie became a social worker and used ballads as part of her
work in New York City’s Henry Street Settlement.
Her singing came to folklorists’ attention in 1946, when she attended the Renfro
Valley Folk Festival in Kentucky and met Artus Moser, then on a collecting trip for the
Library of Congress. He recorded her versions of “Father Grumble” and “Lord Bateman,”
among others, and when these ballads were released the following year on 78-rpm
records she found herself in demand for folk concerts at New York University. By 1950
she had recorded her first LP, and in 1952 she won a Fulbright grant to collect folksongs
in the British Isles. Her well-known autobiography and song anthology, SingingFamily of
the Cumberlands (1955), appeared soon after.
Her upbringing and Hindman education made Ritchie familiar with the performance
style of the unaccompanied ballad, but because she trained her voice during her college
days she was able to modify the hard-edged native-ballad sound to a sweeter style more
acceptable to urban audiences. Between her family’s store and her own fieldwork, she
developed a huge repertoire, and by the start of the 1960s folk-revival movement she was
acknowledged to be one of the foremost, and most authentic, interpreters of folk ballads.
The wife of filmmaker George Pickow, she participated in many films and sound
recordings documenting Appalachian ballads, folksongs, and singing folk games. She
also composed a number of original songs, of which “Black Wa ters,” a protest of water
pollution caused by strip mining, is the best known.
Bill Ellis
References
Bronson, Bertrand H., ed. 1960. Child Ballads Traditional in the United States. AAFS L57.
Washington DC: Library of Congress. Sound Recording.
Emrich, Duncan, ed. 1947. Anglo-American Songs and Ballads. AAFS L21. Washington DC:
Library of Congress. Sound Recording.
Ritchie, Jean. 1958. The Ritchie Family of Kentucky. Folkways Records FA 2316.
——. 1961. British Tmditional Ballads [Child Ballads] in the Southern Mountains, ed. Kenneth
A.Goldstein. Folkways Records. FA 2301–02.
——. 1965. Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians. New York: Oak Publications.
——. 1977. None But One. ABC Records. SK7530.
Whisnant, David E. 1983. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American
Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.