October, 2026

Jean Ritchie: The Mother of Folk

By Ron Pen
Contributing Writer

Prelude: The dulcimer pick

I was at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, on a delicious summery day in the mountains. Hindman is one of my favorite places on earth, a narrow bit of bottomland bounded by Troublesome Creek and embraced by the verdant Cumberland Mountains. So, here I am, sitting on the porch of the Stuckey Building perched atop a steep hillside, playing dulcimer with several people, including Jean Ritchie. On a particularly emphatic and clumsy strum, my pick slipped out of my hand and found its way between the cracks on the porch floor. A few seconds later Jean handed me one of her own. 

Nothing remarkable in that, except that my lost pick was one of those generic fake tortoise shell triangular-shaped picks that come in various gauges that can be purchased at a music store for 25 cents each…. Jean’s was unique. It was really flexible, hand-cut from some sort of bright yellow plastic container lid. There was a little design of a coffee cup on it and some name that didn’t register with me. I didn’t give it another thought and resumed strumming along with her on “Pretty Saro.” “Down in some lone valley, in a lonesome place, where the wild birds do whistle, and their notes do increase….”

Later, as I was putting my instrument away, I looked at the pick Jean had generously given me. It was handmade and ergonomically engineered to fit the hand perfectly. But then my attention was drawn to the name on the pick, ” El Pico.” Cute, I thought, Jean had enjoyed a play on words — the “pick,” more formally a “plectrum,” even had a self-referential name somewhere between English and Spanish “plectro.” Further, Jean had simply recycled the lid from the coffee she drank — El Pico. But then I noticed there was another play on names — her husband was the renowned photographer George Pickow. This pick was also a homonym on her married name of Pickow — Pico. 

Jean and her sisters knew and loved words — they were ferocious Scrabble players. 

This seemingly insignificant gift revealed a window into Jean’s personality and artistic soul. On one level, her pick was highly utilitarian, serving as the interface between her hand and the strings of her instrument. Tone and dynamics are shaped by the pick’s contact with the dulcimer strings. However, I realized that this humble little pick also represented nuanced layers of thought, attentiveness, and humor that were masked by the seeming simplicity of the object. In the same way, the complex facets of Jean’s creative mind are cloaked by the disarmingly simple persona of her self-deprecating statement: “Aw shucks, I’m just a simple mountain woman.” 

While all the previous Ritchie children had attended nearby Hindman and Pine Mountain Settlement Schools, Jean was the first to attend and graduate from Viper High School. She was a bright and inquisitive girl in a family that valued education — even for women. A poem Jean wrote as a 14-year-old imparts a little flavor of her thoughtful nature. 

            “On the Sand by the River”

When I look at this hand before my eyes

And lift with thumb and finger this firm skin,

Warm and alive and springing to the touch,

The fingers flexing, moving to my will —

I cannot think that it is formed of dust

That sifts apart and scatters with the wind. [2]

The family’s modest two-bedroom home (with a few small lean-to additions built to accommodate 14 children!), located in “Slabtown” on a hillside overlooking the North Fork of the Kentucky River, was an unlikely setting for the nativity of this musical celebrity. On the other hand, it was perhaps exactly the right place to nurture Jean’s traditional music and ability to translate the Appalachian context of family and home to large concert, festival, and recording audiences. Her success was predicated on her uncanny ability to share the intimacy of front porch participatory singing with the public scale of the commercial performative world. For instance, Jean would begin her performance of a play party song such as, “What’ll I Do with the Baby-O,” by spinning an engaging informational story that revealed the context of putting the little ones to bed during a house party square dance. 

“During the work (corn cultivation and harvesting) season, the young people would gather almost every Saturday night at someone’s house to run sets. Set-running is like square dancing except that a set is not limited to four couples but is for ‘As many as will.’ Our whole family used to go, babes and all, and of course, along about ten-thirty at night we little ones would drop one by one around the room and be carried into the back room and placed on a big featherbed. There we lay, piles of babies, some sleeping, some whining, some yelling and the mothers and big sisters would take turns singing staying with us, bouncing the bed up and down and singing ditty words to whatever tune was being fiddled in the next room.”

What’ll I do with the Baby-o?

If he don’t go to sleepy-o? 

Wrap him up in calico, 

Send him to his mammy-o.

What’ll I do with the baby-o?

If he don’t go to sleepy-o?

Dance him north, Dance him south,

Pour a little moonshine in his mouth. [3]

Her performances conjure the meaning and the role of the song within daily life lived in the mountains. The audience doesn’t simply hear the song, they are drawn into the world in which the song lives. Jean described how she honed this performance approach in a 2002 interview with Mary K. Lee for the National Heritage Award: 

“I just sort of went along with what the audience seemed to like. They wanted to hear the stories, the descriptions of growing up and who sang what song and what it meant to them and why the song came to be and so on. I'd just sort of ramble on talking about a particular song and describing things, and afterwards people would come up and say ‘We love the stories. We could listen to them all night.’ That sort of dictated the way my performances turned out over the years. People really wanted me to talk and they liked the informality. ‘It was just like sitting in your living room,’ they'd say. Or ”'It's just like being on your porch.' It was just me and them. I was on the stage but each one would say, ‘You were talking to me.’ I don't know how that happened but that's what people are always telling me. Some of them were really amazed. They thought it was incredible that somebody could be that informal on the stage - in the fifties people were still wearing tuxedos to concerts and acted very proper, so my kind of thing was a revolution in its way. I just sat there and talked and sang."

Singing up the moon

Many of the families in the hills and hollers of 20^th-century Perry County, Kentucky, possessed inherited musical traditions. This was particularly true of old-time dance music for fiddle and banjo, but the Ritchie Family were distinguished by their vocal music background. They had a reputation as the “singing family of the Cumberlands” because of their extensive repertoire, their willingness to share music with friends and family, and their frequent practice of “singing up the moon” on the old porch. Jean’s evocative description of the family’s nocturnal music was delightfully detailed in Singing Family of the Cumberlands.

“Even before I was old enough to take much part in anything else the grownups did, I was doing my share in singing the moon up on those soft summer nights. Dad and the girls and boys would come in hot and dusty from the fields around four o’clock, and we’d all head for the cool willow-hung river that ran around the foot of the mountain down in front of our house. Mom and one or two of the girls would get supper and we’d eat, and then I began to work to get everybody out onto the porch. I remember I would always be so afraid that the family would decide not to sing tonight, that I would even dry the dishes without being made to. I would keep talking all the while about what a pretty time it was outside, to get them in the notion. But most of the time, I need not have worried about it, for by the time the dishes were done, Mom and Dad and the boys would be out on the porch, Dad tipped back against the wall in his straight-backed chair, smoking his pipe, Mom swinging and humming gently in the creaky porch swing, and the boys scattered here and there, leaning against the rough bark posts and talking in low tones.” [4]