Hedy West

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hedy West (April 6, 1938 - July 3, 2005) was an American folksinger and songwriter.

She was of the same generation as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and other household-name "Sixties folkies". Musically she was the equal of any of her peers. Her stylistic range was far narrower, but arguably far deeper. Born in the mountains of northern Georgia, she had a darkly authentic folk tradition in her blood.

Her father, Don West, was a 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 Cultural Center in Pipestem, West Virginia. Many of Hedy's songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from her maternal grandparents, whose musical roots reached back to their ancestral villages in the British Isles.

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.

She moved to New York in the late 1950s to study drama, and later attribted some of her mesmerizing ability to get 'inside' her songs to her early training as an actress. There, she soon encounted and was embraced by the Greenwich Village folk scene, and before long cut two solo album for Vanguard Records. Throughout a long, but increasingly marginalized, career, she made many albums for other labels, large and small, often in Europe, until cancer ruined her voice in her last years. Perhaps her finest 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.

She could play the guitar and the banjo. For the latter she favored a technique called clawhammer. Her hard-driving yet always graceful banjo-strumming often scaled virtuousic heights.

In the 1960s Hedy moved to London and widely performed in Europe. On returning to the the US in the 1970s she devoted much of her time to picking her elderly grandparents' brains for scraps of musical memory. After 1980, she was mainly based in Germany, where her kind of music still found enthusiastic audiences.

Her song "500 miles," was covered by The Highwaymen, and Peter, Paul and Mary, and many others.