Appalachian Figures
On a summer stage at Newport in the 1960s, a slight woman in a simple dress sat behind two microphones with a long, heart-cut instrument across her lap. The photographs show her face intent and calm as her fingers moved over the fretboard of a mountain dulcimer. For many in that audience it was their first glimpse of the old Kentucky instrument. For Jean Ritchie it was simply home carried onto a festival stage.
Ritchie grew up in the hamlet of Viper in Perry County, the youngest of fourteen children in one of Kentucky’s most documented ballad singing families. From that crowded house along the North Fork of the Kentucky River she carried hundreds of songs into classrooms, concert halls, field recording sessions, and television studios. Over the course of a long life she became singer, writer, collector, and cultural activist. The National Endowment for the Arts would eventually honor her as a National Heritage Fellow and remember her as both ambassador and steward of Appalachian tradition.
Today the story of Jean Ritchie is more accessible than ever because she left such a rich trail of primary sources. Her own memoir and song collections, hours of Library of Congress recordings with Alan Lomax, Folkways albums that weave together interviews and family performances, Fulbright field recordings in Ireland and Scotland, and the sprawling Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection at the American Folklife Center all allow us to hear her voice directly.
This article leans first on those primary materials then on the carefully built secondary literature to follow Ritchie from a singing family in Viper to a life that helped reshape how the wider world hears Appalachian music.
A Singing Family In Perry County
Jean Ruth Ritchie was born on December 8, 1922, to Balis Wilmar and Abigail Hall Ritchie in Viper, an unincorporated community in Perry County, Kentucky. Scholars have long described the Ritchies as one of the great ballad families of the southern mountains. Alongside their neighbors, the Combses of Knott County, they preserved dozens of British and Irish narrative songs in Appalachian variants, singing them at home long before scholars arrived with notebooks and disc cutters.
Ritchie’s most important account of that childhood is her 1955 book Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Written in the plain, vivid language of eastern Kentucky, it moves through workdays on the farm, school terms in Viper, and nights on the front porch when kin would “sing the moon up” with ballads, hymns, and play party songs. The book is at once memoir and folklore collection, with unaccompanied melodies and texts for more than forty songs threaded through stories of family life.
The Ritchie family story can also be heard directly on tape. Even before Jean left Kentucky, New York folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle and collector Artus Moser recorded Jean and her sisters in 1946, capturing their harmonies on older ballads. A little more than a decade later Folkways Records issued Jean Ritchie Interviews Her Family, With Documentary Recordings. On that album Jean travels room to room in the Viper home, drawing out siblings and parents as they remember family history and then sing. The accompanying booklet layers in genealogies and tales of Perry County life. Taken together, the book and album form one of the most intimate portraits we have of a twentieth century Appalachian singing household.
Religion was part of that soundscape. The Ritchies attended Old Regular Baptist services in nearby Jeff, Kentucky, where the congregation practiced lining out, with a leader chanting each line of a hymn and the people following in slow, ornamented unison. Later recordings of Ritchie family gatherings include versions of “Amazing Grace” and “Brightest and Best” sung in that style. These performances would travel with Jean to New York stages and into Library of Congress collections, but they began as the everyday worship of a small mountain community.
Later fieldwork only broadened the document trail around that world. During the early 1950s Jean and her husband, photographer George Pickow, returned to eastern Kentucky with tape recorder and camera in hand. Their Kentucky and Tennessee recordings include services in Old Regular Baptist churches at Jeff and Ulvah, informal singing at home, and images of people and landscapes that framed the songs. Those reels and photographs are now part of the Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection at the Library of Congress, where they anchor any effort to reconstruct the sound of Perry County in mid century.
From Viper To Lexington And New York City
Like many young people in the Cumberlands, Jean Ritchie left home in stages. After high school in Viper she enrolled at Cumberland Junior College in Williamsburg, then transferred to the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She sang in glee club and choir, picked up piano, and in 1946 graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in social work. Her college years already drew the attention of outside collectors and scholars who saw in the Ritchie repertoire a rare window onto older ballads.
That same year she took a job as a social worker at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. There she taught games, songs, and crafts to children on the Lower East Side, carrying the play party pieces and ballads of Perry County into an urban, immigrant neighborhood. According to the National Heritage Fellowship biography, this work quickly put her in the orbit of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, and Alan Lomax, who saw in her both a tradition bearer and an articulate interpreter of her culture.
Alan Lomax invited her into his Greenwich Village apartment studio. In 1949 and 1950 he recorded several hours of her singing and talking about the songs she had learned in Viper. The Lomax Digital Archive now streams these sessions, which include children’s play songs, long narrative ballads, hymns, and casual conversation about family and community. Individual entries list dates, disc numbers, and short descriptions such as “Skin and Bones, game song, recorded May 5, 1949” that underscore how carefully the sessions were documented at the time.
In these recordings Ritchie does more than perform. She patiently explains how different relatives sang a song, which verses were considered “too wicked” for children, and how lyrics traveled between meetinghouse, coal camp, and home. The result is a kind of oral autobiography in fragments, one that modern listeners can still assemble by following Lomax’s catalog through the Association for Cultural Equity site.
Radio preserved another strand of her New York story. Beginning in the late 1940s she appeared regularly on Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival on WNYC. By the 1950s she was a frequent guest in the Chicago studio of broadcaster Studs Terkel, whose programs mixed live performance with interview. In an April 1981 broadcast, for example, Ritchie spends forty minutes describing her Kentucky upbringing, connecting Appalachian ballads to English and Irish relatives, and reflecting on what it meant to carry family songs into public performance. Later rebroadcasts of those conversations keep her speaking voice in circulation.
Throughout this period she continued to return home for visits, to write down family histories, and to record with kin. By the time Folkways issued Jean Ritchie Interviews Her Family in 1963, listeners could trace a line from those early New York field recordings back to the front porch in Viper and forward into the wider folk revival.
The Dulcimer And The Folk Revival
If Ritchie’s voice carried the songs, her dulcimer helped change how the outside world pictured Appalachian music. The mountain dulcimer had been a largely local instrument in eastern Kentucky and neighboring areas, often played quietly at home. Jean’s father Balis kept one but was initially protective of it. Family stories preserved in interviews describe how a young Jean secretly experimented with the instrument until her father decided she was a “natural born musician” and began to teach her formally.
By the time she was working in New York her dulcimer playing had become a hallmark of her performances. Photographs from the period show her seated with the instrument across her lap at festivals and on television sets. In the words of later commentators she almost single handedly sparked a national revival of interest in the Appalachian dulcimer, both by playing it on stage and by making it approachable in print and recordings.
Her 1963 volume The Dulcimer Book mixes instruction with cultural history. Alongside tuning charts and modal scales she tells stories about dulcimer makers in Perry and Knott Counties, family instruments fashioned by local craftsmen, and the old habit of strumming with a goose quill. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History now preserves a copy of the book as an artifact of both instrument design and mid century folk revival pedagogy.
Ritchie’s recordings also put the dulcimer in front of new audiences. Albums such as Ballads from Her Appalachian Family Tradition present her unaccompanied singing side by side with dulcimer backed pieces, while later releases and instructional records focus specifically on dulcimer technique. Smithsonian Folkways liner notes emphasize how these projects draw directly on the Ritchie family repertoire while inviting new players to take up the instrument.
Recognition followed. Ritchie served on the first folklore panel for the National Endowment for the Arts and directed or performed at early Newport Folk Festivals. In 2002 the NEA honored her with the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship, citing her dual role as musician and cultural activist who had “shared her music and her commitment to her Appalachian home with audiences around the nation and around the world.”
Field Trip: Following The Songs Back Across The Ocean
Ritchie’s work as a tradition bearer did not stop with presenting Appalachian songs to urban audiences. In 1952 she received a Fulbright scholarship that allowed her to travel for more than a year through Ireland, Scotland, and England. Her aim was to record singers whose ballads and hymns might be cousins to the ones she had learned in Viper. Husband George Pickow accompanied her, camera and recorder in hand.
During those months the couple logged countless hours of tape in cottages, parish halls, and small town pubs. Some of these performances later appeared on albums such as Field Trip and Field Trip England, which juxtapose Ritchie family versions with British and Irish recordings. In the liner notes she reflects on listening to singers beside hearth fires and feeling as if she had come home again, convinced that she had located the sources of songs that had taken root in the Cumberland Mountains.
Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives now hold a substantial portion of this material in the collection titled Jean Ritchie Folk Music of Ireland and Scotland Recordings. Catalog descriptions identify performances by Scottish and Irish singers recorded in 1952 and 1953 along with Ritchie’s notes. Many of these recordings are available in online playlists that let listeners follow her Fulbright journey track by track.
The Fulbright work did more than satisfy personal curiosity about family songs. It positioned Ritchie as a cultural intermediary who could speak with equal ease to Appalachian neighbors and to European tradition bearers about the shared histories of ballads like “Lord Bateman” or “The House Carpenter.” Later scholars, including S. H. Brumfield in a dissertation on Ritchie’s Scottish fieldwork, have used these recordings to explore how transatlantic song traffic shaped both British and Appalachian repertoires.
Mountain Born And The Berea Years
The decades after her Fulbright tour were full ones. Jean and George settled on Long Island, raising two sons while she balanced performing, writing, and collecting. Port Washington became a base from which she toured nationally, played concerts at institutions such as the Port Washington Public Library, and eventually recorded a long oral history interview for the library’s local history project in 1992.
Behind the public appearances the paper trail grew. The American Folklife Center’s finding aid for the Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection lists hundreds of audio reels and nearly ten moving image formats, along with scripts, photographs, and project files. Among them are materials for her 1963 radio series “As I Roved Out,” documentation of teaching residencies, and workings scripts for concert specials. The collection even preserves a transcript of her Port Washington oral history, narrating in her own words the path from Viper to the folk revival.
The same collection houses production files for the Kentucky Educational Television documentary Mountain Born: The Jean Ritchie Story. First aired in 1996 and later updated, the program intercuts interviews with Jean, scenes shot in Viper and Berea, and commentary from contemporaries such as Pete Seeger and Loyal Jones. KET’s educator guide presents a biographical timeline that highlights mileposts like her 1922 birth in Viper, 1946 graduation from the University of Kentucky and move to New York, first formal concert in 1948, and national recognition in the following decades.
By the 1970s Ritchie’s path had looped back to Kentucky in more permanent ways. She developed close ties with Berea College, performing and teaching at the annual Celebration of Traditional Music and contributing to Appalachian studies initiatives. The Loyal Jones Appalachian Center’s biographical entry on “Jean Ruth Ritchie” emphasizes her overlapping roles as performer, scholar, author, collector, and activist, as well as her connection to artifacts in Berea’s Appalachian teaching collections. In 1991 the college awarded her an honorary doctorate, a moment documented in the Ritchie and Pickow papers.
In her later years Ritchie lived quietly in Berea, still surrounded by music and neighbors who knew her as a local resident as much as a national figure. She died there on June 1, 2015, at age ninety two. Obituaries and tributes from institutions such as the Smithsonian, the NEA, and Kentucky press outlets remembered her as the “Mother of Folk,” as a matriarch of Kentucky mountain music, and as a writer whose Singing Family of the Cumberlands had become a classic of American letters. In 2016 she entered the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, underlining the literary as well as musical significance of her work.
Songs Of Memory And Protest
Many listeners first encounter Jean Ritchie as the gentle voice of centuries old ballads. Yet primary sources show that she was just as committed to writing new songs and to using her platform to speak for the mountains. Interviews, liner notes, and the long oral history chapter “The Preservationist” in Silas House and Jason Howard’s Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal present her not simply as an archivist of old tunes but as someone deeply troubled by what strip mining and mountaintop removal mining were doing to the land where those songs had grown.
In that chapter Ritchie recalls childhood memories of clear creeks and wooded ridges, then contrasts them with the blasted landscapes and polluted streams she witnessed later in life. Her comments echo the mood of songs like “Black Waters,” a lament for a river darkened by coal waste, and “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” which chronicles the economic and emotional fallout when trains and jobs vanish from a mountain town. Later performances, including one recorded at Berea’s Celebration of Traditional Music, show her introducing these songs with quiet but firm commentary on corporate power and environmental loss.
Ritchie’s activism was not limited to environmental issues. Her writing and interviews often stress the dignity of working people and the importance of local memory. In both Singing Family of the Cumberlands and Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie she frames songs as community testimony. Extensive notes identify who sang each piece, where and when she learned it, and how the text varies from printed versions. Later scholars such as J. D. Roberson, in a study of folk songs in concert guitar literature, have treated these books as key source texts because they bind musical notation to ethnographic detail.
Other Ritchie authored collections, including Jean Ritchie’s Swapping Song Book, The Dulcimer Book, Jean Ritchie’s Dulcimer People, A Garland of Mountain Song, and the later anthology Celebration of Life: Her Songs, Her Poems, blur the line between folklore and original composition. With commentary, poems, and new songs interspersed among traditional material, they reveal an artist reflecting on her own legacy while still adding to the tradition she inherited.
Listening To Jean Today
For anyone who wants to follow Jean Ritchie’s story from Viper outward, the archival record offers many entry points. The most concentrated body of material sits in the Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center. Its hundreds of sound recordings include Kentucky family gatherings, Fulbright field tapes from the British Isles, concert recordings, and interviews that span decades. The associated photographs and production files document how she and Pickow shaped the public image of Appalachian music through albums, documentaries, and educational programs.
The Alan Lomax Collection of Jean Ritchie recordings provides another essential set of primary sources. The 1949 and 1950 New York sessions capture her early in her career, before the dulcimer and memoir made her widely famous, while later tapes from the Newport Folk Festival in 1966 show her navigating a major stage. All are now accessible through the Lomax Digital Archive with detailed cataloging.
On the recording side, Smithsonian Folkways maintains several Ritchie titles in print, including Ballads from Her Appalachian Family Tradition, the Field Trip series, and reissues of Girl of Constant Sorrow and Jean Ritchie Interviews Her Family. The accompanying liner notes often reproduce parts of her own commentary on songs, giving readers another layer of first person reflection. Internet Archive streams Jean Ritchie Interviews Her Family, With Documentary Recordings and other albums, offering free access to listeners around the world.
Berea College’s Appalachian Oral History Collection preserves recordings of Ritchie’s concert and interview appearances on campus, including a “Christmas Country Dance School” interview that mixes talk and song. The college’s Celebration of Traditional Music recordings capture her on stage at a festival that has itself become a central institution in Appalachian cultural life.
For insight into how she understood her own life in later years, the Port Washington Public Library oral history interview, the Studs Terkel radio conversations, and KET’s Mountain Born documentary each offer extended sessions in which she tells stories in her own cadence. Obituaries and retrospective essays from sources such as the Library of Congress’s Folklife Today blog, the Smithsonian’s women’s history site, Bluegrass Today, and regional Kentucky outlets synthesize those primary sources into concise narratives and underline how widely her influence spread.
When you listen across those sources, certain themes repeat. The crowded house in Viper and the hymns from Jeff. The quiet confidence with which she tuned a dulcimer in front of curious city audiences. The mix of pride and grief in her voice when she spoke about creeks darkened by coal waste or mountains peeled by explosives. Jean Ritchie’s life and work remind us that Appalachian history is not only a matter of battles, strikes, and legislation. It is also found in the songs families sing at night, the instruments they keep tucked behind doors, and the ways one woman from Perry County carried those sounds into a wider world while never quite leaving home.
Sources & Further Reading
Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection, 1923–2015, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Finding aid and collection description, including Kentucky and British Isles field recordings, photographs, and Mountain Born production files. Finding Aids+2cmc.wp.musiclibraryassoc.org+2
Alan Lomax Collection recordings of Jean Ritchie, 1949–1950 New York sessions and 1966 Newport Folk Festival recordings, Lomax Digital Archive, Association for Cultural Equity. Cultural Equity Archive+1
Jean Ritchie Interviews Her Family, With Documentary Recordings (Folkways FA 2316, 1963) and Jean Ritchie: Ballads from Her Appalachian Family Tradition (Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40145) with accompanying booklets and liner notes. Discogs+3Internet Archive+3Discogs+3
Field Trip, Field Trip England, and As I Roved Out (Field Trip Ireland), Smithsonian Folkways recordings from Ritchie’s 1952–53 Fulbright fieldwork in Ireland, Scotland, and England, with Ritchie’s own liner notes. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+2Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+2
Berea College Special Collections and Archives, Jean Ritchie Folk Music of Ireland and Scotland Recordings (BCA 0145 SAA 145) and Appalachian Oral History Collection (BCA 0059 SAA 059), including Jean Ritchie concert and interview tapes and Celebration of Traditional Music recordings. dla.contentdm.oclc.org+3Berea College Archives+3Berea College Archives+3
Port Washington Public Library Oral History Project, “PWPL Oral History Project: Jean Ritchie” (1992), archived via the Internet Archive, with audio and local history documentation. Internet Archive+1
Jean Ritchie, Singing Family of the Cumberlands (Oxford University Press, 1955; University Press of Kentucky reprints) and Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie (Oak Publications, 1965; expanded University Press of Kentucky edition, 1997). Bookshop.org+3The University Press of Kentucky+3Internet Archive+3
Jean Ritchie, The Dulcimer Book (Oak Publications, 1963) and other Ritchie authored collections such as Jean Ritchie’s Swapping Song Book, Jean Ritchie’s Dulcimer People, A Garland of Mountain Song, and Celebration of Life: Her Songs, Her Poems. National Museum of American History+2Amazon+2
KET, Mountain Born: The Jean Ritchie Story (1996; updated 2008) and associated educator materials and timeline hosted at KET Education. Finding Aids+3education.ket.org+3KET+3
Stephen Winick, “Jean Ritchie, 1922–2015,” Folklife Today blog, Library of Congress; “Jean Ritchie, 1922–2015,” American Folklife Center tributes and related posts on the George Pickow and Jean Ritchie Collection. The Library of Congress+2The Library of Congress+2
National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellowship biography “Jean Ritchie” and NEA statement on her death, 2015. National Endowment for the Arts+1
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Mother of Folk Jean Ritchie Was Born 100 Years Ago Today” and related object record for The Dulcimer Book and associated dulcimers; Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame biographical entries. Carnegie Center+3Smithsonian Women’s History Museum+3National Museum of American History+3
Julianne E. Laird, “Folk Song to Formal Performance: Interpreting the Songs of Jean Ritchie for Voice Recital” (DMA thesis, West Virginia University, 2019); S. H. Brumfield, “Jean Ritchie’s ‘Field Trip – Scotland’: An Examination of Unpublished Field Recordings Collected in Scotland, 1952–1953” (PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2000); K. Q. Hayes, “From the Front Porch to Performance” (Wright State University, 2008); J. D. Roberson, “Traditional Folk Songs in Concert Literature for Classical Guitar” (University of South Carolina, 2023). Academia+3Academia+3YMAWS+3
Silas House and Jason Howard, “The Preservationist,” in Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), a long first person oral history chapter with Jean Ritchie on coal, land, and activism. JSTOR+1