Jean Ritchie: Kentucky Folk Legend Dies At 92


Jean Ritchie, a Kentucky-born folk legend, has died at the age of 92.

WMYT Mountain News confirmed the singer died on Monday night at her home in Berea, Kentucky. According to her niece Judy Hudson, she was surrounded by her family as she took her final breaths.

The tall red-headed singer was born in 1922 and grew up in Kentucky’s Cumberland mountains. After graduating college, she moved to New York City with only a collection of ballads and a dulcimer, an instrument played while sitting down.

“We knew all the old songs and the ballads and things that the ancestors had brought with them from England, Scotland and Ireland,” Ritchie recalled of her childhood. “We used to sit out on the porch at the end of the day and chose songs as we thought of them. We’d sing for about an hour.”

While she sang hundreds of songs, a few of her most well known are, “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” ”Old Virginny,” ”One Morning in May,” and “Aunt Sal’s Song.”

Ritchie had been living on the East coast, but after suffering from a stroke several years ago, she decided to move back to her home in Kentucky, according to Yahoo News. Ritchie had a love for folk music, and served as an inspiration for the younger group of musicians and singers.

“I see folk music as a river that never stopped flowing,” she told The New York Times during an interview in 1980. “Sometimes a few people go to it and sometimes a lot of people do. But it’s always there.”

Last year, Jean appeared on her final CD, Dear Jean: Artists Celebrate Jean Ritchie, a two-disc special tribute to the singer which included her older songs.

“Nobody was more important than Jean not only in bringing the old songs to new audiences but also in encouraging generations of new musicians,” Dan Schatz, co-producer of the CD said. “Nobody in the music community will ever forget Jean.”

“She has single-handedly preserved hundreds of songs that would have been lost otherwise,” Kentucky-born novelist and musician Silas House said during a 2008 interview. “It is hard to measure how important Jean Ritchie has been to folk music.”

[Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images]

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