Hedy West

Early life and family influences

She was born Hedwig Grace West in Cartersville 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 a friend killed. He co-founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, and later ran the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia.

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 neighboring 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 Lillie West, 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 lifelong influence. Her liner notes for 1967's Old Times and Hard Times, written from self-imposed exile in London, are a personal statement on the corrosive effect of the Vietnam War, claiming, "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 to numerous benefit concerts for unfashionable causes — as did 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, highlighting the lives of marginalized blue-collar women including factory workers, servants, and single mothers.

Education, career and later life

Hedy West attended Western Carolina College. In 1959, she moved to New York City 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 being included on the 1961 compilation album New Folks for Vanguard, she soon made two eponymous solo records for the company.

She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where she continued singing and later married. West performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. In 1966, she appeared on Pete Seeger's Public Television series Rainbow Quest, in an episode headlined by Mississippi John Hurt. 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 A.L. 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 writer. 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 BBC Radio 1's Late Night Extra. Shortly thereafter - date unknown - they divorced.

In the autumn 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, with whom she had a daughter, Talitha. She was an adjunct Professor and taught two courses in Folk Music. One of her students, singer-songwriter Robin Greenstein, worked with her cataloging 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 '90s, following the death of her husband, she moved to Lower Merion Township in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, suburbs, where she spent most of her final years. One of her last performances was at the Eisteddfod Festival, sponsored by the Folk Music Society of New York at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, in 2004.

West's 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. "500 Miles" has been recorded 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 well-known song that she wrote and copyrighted (but which borrows heavily from existing traditional folk material) is "Cotton Mill Girl".

Cancer ruined her voice in her last years. A fine musical legacy is in unreleased recordings, such as a live concert from the 1978 University of Chicago Folk Festival, broadcast in her memory by The Midnight Special program of local radio station WFMT. It was her fate to reach the height of her powers long after popular tastes and the music industry had moved on. Even in the heyday of folk music she resisted pressure to slicken up her authentic style in order to become more commercial.

Hedy West died of cancer on 3 July 2005.

Discography

[Note: The two eponymous recordings on Vanguard were combined into a single CD (with 2 bonus tracks) and reissued by Ace Records as Vanguard Masters VCD 79124 (2012).]