"When Jean Ritchie, who has died aged 92, emerged on to the embryonic New York folk scene in the 1940s, her repertoire of family songs from the Anglo-American tradition of the southern Appalachian mountains was seized upon by folksong enthusiasts as proof of the veracity of the old music. It was a tradition that had first been exposed to a wider audience by the English folksong collector Cecil Sharp in 1916-18: indeed, Sharp had noted songs from the Ritchie family in 1917. The quality of the music recorded by Sharp, and contained in the Ritchie family songs, contributed to the reassessment of the Appalachians, which had previously been seen as culturally backward." http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/03/jean-ritchie #RIP #JeanRitchie

RIP 5 Jun 2015