The youngest of fourteen children, Jean Ritchie was born and raised in Viper, Kentucky, in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Walled in by the rugged Cumberland ridges, Ritchie’s family and their neighbors farmed their hillsides using primitive methods and entertained themselves with games and ballads handed down through the generations from their Scottish, […]
Read MoreBorn in Winnipeg in 1920, Oscar Brand is linked forever to Long Island by his Brooklyn College years and subsequent residence. Upon discharge from the Army, Brand started broadcasting “Folk Song Festival” in 1945 over WNYC radio; the show has been noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running radio show continuously […]
Read MoreArlo Guthrie was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in 1947. He is the eldest son of singer/writer/philosopher Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company. He grew up surrounded by dancers and musicians, including Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman and Lee Hays (The Weavers), Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Ramblin’ […]
Read MoreBorn in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Richie Havens moved to Greenwich Village in 1961 in time to get in on the folk boom. He had a distinctive style as a folksinger—with his guitar set to an opening tuning, he would strum it while barring chords with his thumb, using it essentially as percussion while […]
Read MoreSinger-songwriter Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk, known professionally as “Melanie,” was born in 1947 and raised in the Astoria section of Queens in New York City. She made her first public singing appearance at age four on the radio show “Live Like a Millionaire,” performing the song “Gimme a Little Kiss.” In the 1960s, she developed her chalky […]
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