Hedy West (April 6, 1938 - July 3, 2005) was an American folksinger and songwriter.
West was of the same generation as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and others of the American folk music revival. Her most famous song "500 Miles" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs. She was described by the English folk musician AL Lloyd as "far and away the best of American girl singers in the [folk] revival." She was born Hedwig Grace West in the mountains of northern Georgia in 1938 and died of cancer in 2005.
Early life
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 South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia. Many of Hedy's songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from her paternal grandmother, Lily West, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child. [1]
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.
Career
Having won a prize for ballad singing when she was only 12, by her teens West was singing at folk festivals, both locally and in neighbouring states. In 1959, she moved to New York 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 everyday 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. Her talents were quickly recognized and, after singing on a 1961 compilation album, New Folks, for the Vanguard Records label, she soon made two solo records for the company.
She moved to the west coast and Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where she continued singing and later married. 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 AL 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 wrtiter. 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 the BBC Radio 1's Late Night Extra. Shortly thereafter - date unknown - they divorced.
In the early 1970s, she lived in Germany, where, before returning to the US to study composition and devoting time to picking her elderly grandparents' brains for scraps of musical memory, she made two further recordings, one with fellow American Bill Clifton, Getting Folk out of the Country (1974), and another entitled Love, Hell and Biscuits (1980). She moved out to eastern Long Island in the 1970's to study Composition with Composer David Lewin (sic) at SUNY-Stony Brook and resided with her husband Joseph close to the University. While at SUNY-Stony Brook, she was also an adjunct Professor and taught two courses in Folk Music (one of her students, who went on to work with her cataloguing her record and tape collection, was singer-songwriter Robin Greenstein). She later moved to Pennsylvania, where she spent her final years. One of her last performances was at the Eisteddford Festival in Brooklyn, NY at Brooklyn Polytechnic University around 2005.
Cancer ruined her voice in her last years. A fine 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 played the guitar and the banjo. She played both clawhammer style and a unique type of three finger picking that wasn't quite bluegrass, and wasn't quite old-time, but was a special, almost classical or flamenco-like technique.
Her 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, and the rest is history. "500 Miles" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs, and has been covered by Bobby Bare (a Billboard Top 10 hit in 1963), The Highwaymen, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Peter & Gordon, and many others. Bob Dylan essentially lifted it entirely for one song from his later albums (from the 2000's). Another song that she wrote and copyrighted (but which borrows heavily from existing traditional folk material) is "Cotton Mill Girls."
Notes
- ^ Ken Hurt, "Obituary: Hedy West, The Independent (London), Aug. 3, 2005.
Discography
- New Folks, Vanguard VRS 9096 (1961) [Hedy has 5 tracks on this LP, 3 of which were reissued on The Original New Folks Vanguard CD, VCD-143/144 (1993)]
- Hedy West accompanying herself on the 5-string banjo, Vanguard VRS-9124 (1963)
- Hedy West, Volume 2, Vanguard VRS-9162 (1964)
- Old Times & Hard Times: Ballads and Songs from the Appalachians, Topic 12T117 (London, 1965); Folk-Legacy FSA-32 (1967), reissued CD-32 (2004)
- Pretty Saro and other Appalachian Ballads, Topic 12T146 (1966)
- Ballads, Topic 12T163 (1967)
- Serves 'em Fine, Fontana U.K. STL 5432 (London, 1967)
- with Bill Clifton, Getting Folk Out of the Country, Folk Variety FV12008 / Bear Family BF15008 (1974)
- Love, Hell and Biscuits, Bear Family BF15003 (1980)
