Hedy West
Encyclopedia
Hedy West was an American
folksinger
and songwriter
.
West was of the same generation as Joan Baez
, Judy Collins
, and others of the American folk music revival
. Her most famous song "500 Miles
" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs. She was described by the English folk musician AL Lloyd as "far and away the best of American girl singers in the [folk] revival."
in the mountains of northern Georgia
in 1938. Her father, Don West
, was a southern poet and coal mine labor organizer in the 1930s; his bitter experiences included seeing a close friend machine-gunned on the street by company goons in the presence of a young daughter. Later, he operated the Appalachian
South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia
and co-founded the Highlander Folk School
in New Market, Tennessee
.
Her great-uncle Augustus Mulkey played the fiddle; her paternal grandmother Lillie Mulkey West played the banjo. By her teens West was singing at folk festivals, both locally and in neighbouring states. In the mid-50s she won a prize for ballad-singing in Nashville, TN. Many of her songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from Lily, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child. She used her father's poetry in several songs, such as Anger in the Land.
Her family's politics were also a life-long influence. Her liner notes for 1967's "Old Times and Hard Times", written from self-imposed exile in London, are an eloquent personal statement on the corrosive effect of the Vietnam War
, with the prescient insight, "We'll be controlled by manipulated fear". (See Folk-Legacy Records
.) While living in Stony Brook, New York
, in the late 1970s, she donated her time and talents in unforgettable benefit concerts for unfashionable causes - as did with her fellow Appalachian-on-Long-Island, Jean Ritchie
.
Her songs were rarely if ever overt, topical protests. But her working-class mountain roots were in her voice and ran through everything she sang, giving life and meaning to her laments for beaten-down factory girls and knocked-up servant girls.
to study music at Mannes College and drama at Columbia University
. When she arrived and saw the "Folk Revival" taking place, she realized that the music the Northerners were playing was in fact music she had heard every day growing up. She embraced her "folk" side and started performing it around New York. She later attributed some of her ability to get 'inside' her songs to her early training as an actress. She was embraced by the Greenwich Village
folk scene (most likely in no small part due to the fact that she actually came from the tradition they were reviving), and was invited by Pete Seeger
to sing alongside him at a Carnegie Hall
concert. She was signed to Vanguard Records
by Manny Solomon
after an appearance at the May 6, 1961 Indian Neck Folk Festival. After singing on 1961 compilation album New Folks for Vanguard, she soon made two solo records for the company.
She moved to the west coast and Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where she continued singing and later married. By this time, she was making regular visits to England. She then lived in London for seven years, making tours of the country's folk clubs, and appearing at the Cambridge festival and the first Keele folk festival as well as regular visits to Europe, especially Germany. She recorded three albums for Bill Leader
and AL Lloyd at Topic Records
- Old Times and Hard Times (1965), Pretty Saro (1966) and Ballads (1967) - together with another for Fontana, entitled Serves 'em Fine (1967).
For a few months in 1962 she had been engaged to Roger Zelazny
, who became a well-known science fiction wrtiter. In 1968, in London, she married broadcaster Pete Myers (born Bangalore, India 18 April 1939; died Utrecht, The Netherlands 15 December 1998), one of the founding presenters of the BBC Radio 1's Late Night Extra. Shortly thereafter - date unknown - they divorced.
In the fall of 1970, she moved from Great Britain to Stony Brook. She picked her elderly grandparents' brains for scraps of musical memory. She studied composition with David Lewin
at Stony Brook University, living nearby with her husband Joseph. She was an adjunct Professor and taught two courses in Folk Music. One of her students, singer-songwriter Robin Greenstein, worked with her cataloguing her record and tape collection. On return trips to Europe she made two further recordings. The first, Getting Folk out of the Country (1974)], was recorded in London with fellow American Bill Clifton
and released by FV Schallplatten. The second, Love, Hell and Biscuits (1980), was released by Bear Family Records
in 1976. She lived with her husband and daughter during the decade of the 80s in Princeton, NJ. Then in the early nineties, following the death of her husband, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she spent her final years. One of her last performances was at the Eisteddford Festival in Brooklyn, NY at Brooklyn Polytechnic University around 2005.
Cancer ruined her voice in her last years. A fine musical legacy is in unreleased recordings, such as a live concert from the 1978 Chicago Folk Festival, broadcast in her memory by a local radio station. It was her fate to reach the height of her powers long after popular tastes and the music industry had moved on. [But even in the heyday of folk music she resisted pressure to slicken up her authentic style in order to become more commercial. She was at that time already at the height of her powers, but stuck to the guns of what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it.]
She played the guitar
and the banjo
. She played both clawhammer style and a unique type of three finger picking that wasn't quite bluegrass, and wasn't quite old-time, but was a special, almost classical or flamenco-like technique.
Her most famous song, "500 miles," was put together from fragments of a melody she had heard her uncle sing to her back in Georgia . She copyrighted the resulting patched song, and the rest is history. "500 Miles" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs, and has been covered by Bobby Bare
(a Billboard Top 10 hit in 1963), The Highwaymen
, The Kingston Trio
, Peter, Paul and Mary
, Peter & Gordon
, Rosanne Cash
, and many others. Another song that she wrote and copyrighted (but which borrows heavily from existing traditional folk material) is "Cotton Mill Girls."
Hedy West died of cancer in 2005.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
folksinger
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
and songwriter
Songwriter
A songwriter is an individual who writes both the lyrics and music to a song. Someone who solely writes lyrics may be called a lyricist, and someone who only writes music may be called a composer...
.
West was of the same generation as Joan Baez
Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice....
, Judy Collins
Judy Collins
Judith Marjorie "Judy" Collins is an American singer and songwriter, known for her eclectic tastes in the material she records ; and for her social activism. She is an alumna of the University of Colorado.-Musical career:Collins was born and raised in Seattle, Washington...
, and others of the American folk music revival
American folk music revival
The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States that began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob...
. Her most famous song "500 Miles
500 Miles
"500 Miles" is a folk song made popular in the United States and Europe during the 1960s folk revival. The simple repetitive lyrics offer a lament by a traveler who is far from home, out of money and too ashamed to return...
" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs. She was described by the English folk musician AL Lloyd as "far and away the best of American girl singers in the [folk] revival."
Early life
She was born Hedwig Grace West in CartersvilleCartersville, Georgia
Cartersville is a town in Bartow County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 19,7314. The city is the county seat of Bartow County.-Geography:Cartersville was named for Colonel Farish Carter....
in the mountains of northern Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
in 1938. Her father, Don West
Don West (educator)
Don West was an American writer, poet, educator, trade union organizer, civil-rights activist and a co-founder of the Highlander Folk School.-Early life and career:...
, was a southern poet and coal mine labor organizer in the 1930s; his bitter experiences included seeing a close friend machine-gunned on the street by company goons in the presence of a young daughter. Later, he operated the Appalachian
Appalachian Mountains
The Appalachian Mountains #Whether the stressed vowel is or ,#Whether the "ch" is pronounced as a fricative or an affricate , and#Whether the final vowel is the monophthong or the diphthong .), often called the Appalachians, are a system of mountains in eastern North America. The Appalachians...
South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
and co-founded the Highlander Folk School
Highlander Research and Education Center
The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center located in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski,...
in New Market, Tennessee
New Market, Tennessee
New Market is a town in Jefferson County, Tennessee, United States. It is part of the Morristown, Tennessee Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 1,234 at the 2000 census.-Geography:New Market is located at ....
.
Her great-uncle Augustus Mulkey played the fiddle; her paternal grandmother Lillie Mulkey West played the banjo. By her teens West was singing at folk festivals, both locally and in neighbouring states. In the mid-50s she won a prize for ballad-singing in Nashville, TN. Many of her songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from Lily, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child. She used her father's poetry in several songs, such as Anger in the Land.
Her family's politics were also a life-long influence. Her liner notes for 1967's "Old Times and Hard Times", written from self-imposed exile in London, are an eloquent personal statement on the corrosive effect of the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, with the prescient insight, "We'll be controlled by manipulated fear". (See Folk-Legacy Records
Folk-Legacy Records
Folk-Legacy Records is an independent recording company specializing in traditional and contemporary folk music of the English-speaking world. It was founded in 1961 by Sandy and Caroline Paton along with the late Lee Baker Haggerty...
.) While living in Stony Brook, New York
Stony Brook, New York
Stony Brook is a hamlet located in the Town of Brookhaven in Suffolk County, New York, which is on the North Shore of Long Island...
, in the late 1970s, she donated her time and talents in unforgettable benefit concerts for unfashionable causes - as did with her fellow Appalachian-on-Long-Island, Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie is an American folk singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player.- Out of Kentucky :Abigail and Balis Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky had 14 children, and Jean was the youngest...
.
Her songs were rarely if ever overt, topical protests. But her working-class mountain roots were in her voice and ran through everything she sang, giving life and meaning to her laments for beaten-down factory girls and knocked-up servant girls.
Career
In 1959, she moved to New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
to study music at Mannes College and drama at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. When she arrived and saw the "Folk Revival" taking place, she realized that the music the Northerners were playing was in fact music she had heard every day growing up. She embraced her "folk" side and started performing it around New York. She later attributed some of her ability to get 'inside' her songs to her early training as an actress. She was embraced by the Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
folk scene (most likely in no small part due to the fact that she actually came from the tradition they were reviving), and was invited by Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...
to sing alongside him at a Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
concert. She was signed to Vanguard Records
Vanguard Records
Vanguard Records is a record label set up in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon in New York. It started as a classical label, but is perhaps best known for its catalogue of recordings by a number of pivotal folk and blues artists from the 1960s; the Bach Guild was a subsidiary...
by Manny Solomon
Maynard Solomon
Maynard Solomon has carried out a multiple career: he was a co-founder of Vanguard Records as well as a music producer, and later became a writer on music.-Career in the recording industry:...
after an appearance at the May 6, 1961 Indian Neck Folk Festival. After singing on 1961 compilation album New Folks for Vanguard, she soon made two solo records for the company.
She moved to the west coast and Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where she continued singing and later married. By this time, she was making regular visits to England. She then lived in London for seven years, making tours of the country's folk clubs, and appearing at the Cambridge festival and the first Keele folk festival as well as regular visits to Europe, especially Germany. She recorded three albums for Bill Leader
Bill Leader
Bill Leader is an English recording engineer and record producer. He is particularly associated with the British folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s, producing records by Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Frank Harte and others....
and AL Lloyd at Topic Records
Topic Records
Topic Records is a British folk music label, which played a major role in the second British folk revival. It began as an offshoot of the Workers' Music Association in 1939, making it the oldest independent record label in the world.-History:...
- Old Times and Hard Times (1965), Pretty Saro (1966) and Ballads (1967) - together with another for Fontana, entitled Serves 'em Fine (1967).
For a few months in 1962 she had been engaged to Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for his The Chronicles of Amber series...
, who became a well-known science fiction wrtiter. In 1968, in London, she married broadcaster Pete Myers (born Bangalore, India 18 April 1939; died Utrecht, The Netherlands 15 December 1998), one of the founding presenters of the BBC Radio 1's Late Night Extra. Shortly thereafter - date unknown - they divorced.
In the fall of 1970, she moved from Great Britain to Stony Brook. She picked her elderly grandparents' brains for scraps of musical memory. She studied composition with David Lewin
David Lewin
David Lewin was an American music theorist, music critic and composer. Called "the most original and far-ranging theorist of his generation" , he did his most influential theoretical work on the development of transformational theory, which involves the application of mathematical group theory to...
at Stony Brook University, living nearby with her husband Joseph. She was an adjunct Professor and taught two courses in Folk Music. One of her students, singer-songwriter Robin Greenstein, worked with her cataloguing her record and tape collection. On return trips to Europe she made two further recordings. The first, Getting Folk out of the Country (1974)], was recorded in London with fellow American Bill Clifton
Bill Clifton
Bill Clifton is an American bluegrass musician and singer who is credited with having organized the very first bluegrass festival in the United States in 1961.-Biography:...
and released by FV Schallplatten. The second, Love, Hell and Biscuits (1980), was released by Bear Family Records
Bear Family Records
Bear Family Records is a Germany-based independent record label that specializes in reissues of archival material ranging from country music to 1950s rock and roll to old German movie soundtracks.-History:...
in 1976. She lived with her husband and daughter during the decade of the 80s in Princeton, NJ. Then in the early nineties, following the death of her husband, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she spent her final years. One of her last performances was at the Eisteddford Festival in Brooklyn, NY at Brooklyn Polytechnic University around 2005.
Cancer ruined her voice in her last years. A fine musical legacy is in unreleased recordings, such as a live concert from the 1978 Chicago Folk Festival, broadcast in her memory by a local radio station. It was her fate to reach the height of her powers long after popular tastes and the music industry had moved on. [But even in the heyday of folk music she resisted pressure to slicken up her authentic style in order to become more commercial. She was at that time already at the height of her powers, but stuck to the guns of what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it.]
She played the guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
and the banjo
Banjo
In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...
. She played both clawhammer style and a unique type of three finger picking that wasn't quite bluegrass, and wasn't quite old-time, but was a special, almost classical or flamenco-like technique.
Her most famous song, "500 miles," was put together from fragments of a melody she had heard her uncle sing to her back in Georgia . She copyrighted the resulting patched song, and the rest is history. "500 Miles" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs, and has been covered by Bobby Bare
Bobby Bare
Robert Joseph Bare is an American country music singer and songwriter. He is the father of Bobby Bare, Jr., also a musician.-Early career:...
(a Billboard Top 10 hit in 1963), The Highwaymen
The Highwaymen (folk band)
The Highwaymen were a circa 1960 "collegiate folk" group, which originated at Wesleyan University and had a Billboard number-one hit in 1961 with "Michael" and another Top 20 hit in 1962 with "Cottonfields"...
, The Kingston Trio
The Kingston Trio
The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to late 1960s. The group started as a San Francisco Bay Area nightclub act with an original lineup of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds...
, Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary were an American folk-singing trio whose nearly 50-year career began with their rise to become a paradigm for 1960s folk music. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers...
, Peter & Gordon
Peter & Gordon
Peter and Gordon were a British Invasion-era duo and formed by Peter Asher and Gordon Waller, who achieved fame in 1964 with "A World Without Love", and had several subsequent hits in that era.-History:...
, Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash is an American singer-songwriter and author. She is the eldest daughter of the late country music singer Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin....
, and many others. Another song that she wrote and copyrighted (but which borrows heavily from existing traditional folk material) is "Cotton Mill Girls."
Hedy West died of cancer in 2005.
Discography
- New Folks, Vanguard VRS 9096 (1961) [Hedy has 5 tracks on this LP, 3 of which were reissued on The Original New Folks Vanguard CD, VCD-143/144 (1993)]
- Hedy West accompanying herself on the 5-string banjo, Vanguard VRS-9124 (1963)
- Hedy West, Volume 2, Vanguard VRS-9162 (1964)
- Old Times & Hard Times: Ballads and Songs from the Appalachians, Topic 12T117 (London, 1965); Folk-Legacy FSA-32 (1967), reissued Folk-Legacy CD-32 (2004)
- Pretty Saro and other Appalachian Ballads, Topic 12T146 (1966)
- Ballads, Topic 12T163 (1967)
- Serves 'em Fine, Fontana U.K. STL 5432 (London, 1967)
- with Bill Clifton, Getting Folk Out of the Country, Folk Variety FV12008 / Bear Family BF15008 (1974), reissued on CD - Bear Family BCD 16754 (2010)
- Love, Hell and Biscuits, Bear Family BF15003 (1980)
- Ballads And Songs From The Appalachians, Fellside FECD 241 (2011) - double CD, a reissue comprising the three Topic albums