Jean Ritchie - One I Love-The First Lady Of The Mountains-The First Lady Of The Hills And Hollows Wind-Swept Saturday Night Red Barn Dance-So Long, Jean Ritchie-A Belated RIP

The First Lady Of The Mountains-The First Lady Of The Hills And Hollows Wind-Swept Saturday Night Red Barn Dance-So Long, Jean Ritchie-A Belated RIP

Zack James

Earlier in bthe year (2018) I did an extended series on the role that my oldest brother, Alex, straight Alex not Alexander as you might expect, played on my early
musical development growing up in the 1970s. He, as many of the older writers who either started this publication back in the mid-1970s or were grafted onto the staff by former site manager/editor Allan Jackson have done, cut his teeth
on, or as he put it recently when commenting on the series, he was “present at the creation” of rock and roll, now called the classic age, the 1950s and early 1960s. The series was originally supposed to deal solely with that influence
channeled through him. The was before a feeling of late that other unarticulated influences based on what Alex taught me had some say in the matter. When we were discussing that feeling one night, along with a general discussion about the various threads which contributed to the genre, Alex
pulled me up short when he mentioned how “our father’s music, mountain music, hillbilly music,” had played a role in the development of rock and roll. Had also contributed to the emergence of the folk scene in the early 1960s which
Alex had also taken a small part in through his best friend, Peter Paul Markin, who was crazy for the stuff and was always sneaking over to Harvard Square, sometimes
with Alex in tow, on weekend nights. 

According to Alex, again via Markin, people, young people, some of them anyway, were looking for authentic music, roots music, traditional music. In this case music that
came over from the British Isles maybe Europe and planted itself down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia especially. There was a convergence of  “academic” interest by certain college types along with a desire to learn some new music by poring through the music down in the hills and hollows. Alex’s remarks, his placing my unarticulated feelings in a context connected to our father got me permission from the site manager, currently Greg Green, to extend that
rock and roll series to see what fit in and what didn’t from mountain music. My scurrying around looking for material got me looking straight at the music of Jean Ritchie far from rock and roll but close, very close to our father’s roots
music.

Something in her voice, in her lyrics, in her mournful playing of the dulcimer “spoke” to me, connected me with my father and where he had come from not matter that we
had been very distance from each other long before he passed away. I had heard her music before when I went through my own period of interest in folk music in
the early 1980s at a time when I had had what Alex has called my “outlaw country moment” when guys like Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt and gals like Jessie Logan and Emmy Lou Harris got me interested in that genre. Along the way I explored a few other sub-groups like Tex-Mex, Western Swing with Bob Wills and Milton Brown and bluegrass with the likes of Earl Monroe and Kitty Diamond. Songs from the mountains too.

So yes as Alex intuited I, we, had via some strange transplanting of DNA had turned out to be our father’s sons, had the hills and hollows, the Saturday red barn dance complete with fiddles and mandos, maybe a sweet dulcimer,  hidden in some recesses of our brains ready to come out, come out too late for us to thank him, but come out nevertheless. Which finally brings us back to why I am writing this secular elegy to Jean Ritchie. Somehow, despite paying close attention to the passing of various authors, writers, film people and singers and song-writers in this space dedicated ‘keeping the torch burning” the passing of Jean Ritchie got short shrift at the time. I make slight amends here.