She was the youngest of fourteen children in a narrow hollow at Viper, Kentucky, about as far from a concert stage as a girl could be. And yet the songs she learned on her family's porch ended up in recording studios, universities and festivals around the world. Her name was Jean Ritchie.
Picture the Ritchie house in the evening. A big family on the porch after the work was done, somebody snapping beans, and the old ballads passed around like a dish at supper. Songs that had crossed the ocean generations earlier, sung in the same words their great grandparents had used, with a mountain dulcimer laid across a lap and plucked with a quill.
Jean was born in 1922 and grew up singing with her family. She went on to graduate from the University of Kentucky, then took those songs with her to New York, where folk music lovers had never heard anything quite like them. She later traveled to Britain and Ireland on a Fulbright to find the older versions of the ballads her family sang, and in 1955 she wrote Singing Family of the Cumberlands, the story of the people who taught her.
Here is the beautiful contradiction. A family that many outsiders would have dismissed as poor and backward turned out to be carrying a treasure that scholars spent careers trying to find. Jean did not leave the mountains behind to succeed. She succeeded by carrying them with her, and she helped make the mountain dulcimer known far beyond Kentucky. She was later honored as a National Heritage Fellow.
She spent much of her life teaching, writing and singing, and she never stopped telling people exactly where the songs had come from: a porch in a hollow in Perry County, and a mother, a father and thirteen brothers and sisters who sang them first. The songs your own family sang may be older than anyone knows.