Another link in the chain is broken. Jean Ritchie has left this world. Jean was a dear friend, surrogate mother and teacher to my wife Carol Langstaff. Carol’s mother Diane Hamilton and Jean were good friends. Jean was a role model for Diane as a collector and recorder of the songs she carried with her from her home and family in Viper, Kentucky. She brought those songs to the world when she came to New York and joined up with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, The Almanac Singers, and Oscar Brand, among others. If you want to get an idea of where Jean came from, read her account of her early days in Kentucky, “Singing Family of the Cumberlands.” She paints a vivid picture of a life that was short of material goods, but rich in its culture, which is what Jean took away with her. An audio account of this life is beautifully captured in a Folkways recording that Jean made in 1958 and which is still available, “The Ritchie Family of Kentucky.”
However, Jean was more than a carrier of her culture, she was a messenger who had to tell the world of the forces which were destroying that culture. She wrote songs which told the sad story–songs which have been taken up by artists from Pete Seeger to Hazel Dickens to Kathy Mattea: “Black Waters,” “Blue Diamond Mines,” “West Virginia Mine Disaster,” “Last Old Train’s A Leaving.” Jean was a red-head and had a temper. She had no time for those who put profit ahead of people. Here is what Jean had to say in the liner notes to her album “Clear Waters Remembered.”
“For this is the day of the giant bulldozer, the hideous grinding auger, machinery of the strip-miner, and the smoke and the dust of them hang like a pall of sorrow over the ridges and hollers of Eastern Kentucky. This is the time when the sins of past generations have caught up with us.
For my mother’s father, Grandpa Hall, it was an unwitting sin. He, along with almost all his neighbors, sold the mineral rights to his land to the friendly, likeable man who said he represented a company who thought there might be a little coal on our land worth getting out. The company, he said, was willing to take a big chance and pay Grandpa fifty cents an acre, and, since Grandpa had better than a thousand acres, this amounted to around five hundred dollars, a handsome sum in those days. For a man with a dozen children, it was also impossible to refuse.
Mom says that her father signed an agreement to give up coal rights only, but I looked up the old longform deed in the Hazard courthouse, and it now reads to include all minerals, even salt water, and has a guarantee from the farmer to grant access to the mines. Grandpa and his neighbors had no way of foreseeing that mining would not always take place underground, leaving the surface unspoiled.
To my mind, then, the sins are upon the heads of the strip miners and their collaborators, whose consciences let them maul the land and haul out, severance-tax-free, untold millions of dollars worth of Appalachia’s great natural resources (in addition to the strip mine which has gashed up one of my own beautiful ridges and left erosion, ruined timber and a dead stream; our property also has two natural-gas wells, and we have to pay for the privilege of having gas in our home). We pay tax on the land, what’s left of it, and the people who still live on their land are faced with poor schools, a scarcity of decent jobs, and an increasingly scarred and mutilated landscape.
……Today’s children will call me old fashioned. They are right, but I’m hip enough to know it, and I make no apology for what I feel, say, or sing. Indeed it is my hope that these few poor songs, small voices in the wilderness, may help in the long road we have ahead of us to right those evils we have let happen to people and to nature.”
Jean never gave up that fight until the day she died. She wanted no money spent on flowers to remember her by; she asked that contributions in her name be made to: Appalachian Voices, 125 Grand Blvd., Boone, NC 28607, or visit their website: www.appalachianvoices.org.
Over the years my wife Carol often closed her Flock Dance Troupe performances with Jean’s song “Now Is The Cool of the Day.” It calls on us to look after and care for the beautiful garden of creation, which we all have inherited and share. Pay attention to the words and remember Jean Ritchie.
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And my Lord, He said unto me, Do you like my garden so fair?
You may live in this garden, if you keep the grasses green, and I’ll return in the cool of the day
And my Lord, He said unto me, Do you like my garden so pure?
You may live in this garden, if you keep the waters clean, and I’ll return in the cool of the day
Now is the cool of the day, Now is the cool of the day, Oh, this earth it is a garden, the garden of my Lord, and he walks in His garden in the cool of the day
And my Lord, He said unto me, Do you like my pastures so green?
You may live in this garden, if you will feed my lambs, and I’ll return in the cool of the day
And my Lord, He said unto me, Do you like my garden so free?
You may live in this garden, if you keep the people free, and I’ll return in the cool of the day
Now is the cool of the day, Now is the cool of the day. Oh, this earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord, and he walks in His garden In the cool of the day; yes, he walks in His garden
In the cool of the day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0QuXO4wgE