29 f Woman With Banjo


This year’s fRoots Critics Poll-winning CD reissue of classic 1960s albums by Hedy West has introduced her work to a whole new audience. Martin Simpson, however, is a lifelong fan.


I


saw Hedy West play at the Scun - thorpe Folk Club when I was in my mid to late teens and she staggered me. It was one of the most impor- tant performances of my life. She played a long neck, Pete Seeger model Vega banjo, and a wonderful sounding vintage Washburn guitar that was deco- rated with a decal of a hand pointing to the sound hole. The strength of her play- ing and singing was jaw-dropping. Paul Adams of Fellside Records felt that Hedy commanded the space and the attention of the audience in the same way that the greatest of traditional artists was able to do, comparing her to Jeannie Robertson, the legendary Scottish singer.


This year Paul, after negotiations with


Topic, released Hedy West: Ballads And Songs From The Appalachians, a double CD with lavish notes that has deservedly just won the fRoots Critics Poll Reissue/ Compilation Album Of The Year. It includes three original Topic LPs, Old Times And Hard Times from 1965, Pretty Saro from 1966 and Ballads from 1967. These three albums, recorded by Bill Leader in London, represent the middle period of Hedy West’s recording career.


The repertoire they present is a beauti- ful cross-section of Southern US folk song, including many superb presentations of British ballads and songs, religious songs, dance tunes and American ballads of war, industrial conflict and much more. Hedy contributed massively to the communica- tion and preservation of this material and throughout her recording career, which began in 1961, she was consistent in her quality of performance and material. Bal- lads remains for me one of the most influen- tial records of my lifetime. Nearly 45 years after its release I have been listening to it and its earlier companions probably more than any other record released this year.


Born in Georgia in 1938, Hedy learned extensively from her family’s repertoire of songs and tunes. Her great-grandmother Talitha Mulkey sang and her great-grand- father Gus Mulkey sang and played fiddle. Her grandmother, Lillie West, played the banjo. The family shared songs with friends and neighbours, giving the young Hedwig Grace West a deep and lasting knowledge, love and respect for the songs and music and the history and culture they contain and reflect. Hedy’s contemporaries like Joan Baez and Judy Collins clearly had no such head start.


At four years old, Hedy was given piano lessons and a year later, she started to teach herself to play the banjo. Throughout


her life, classical music and folk music were constants, but she always kept them sepa- rate. She was a classical flautist with iron discipline, a pianist, a composer and a huge- ly intelligent musician.


Hedy’s background was a family full of traditional musicians and left wing politi- cal activism. Her father, Don West, was a trade union organiser, relief worker, poet and songwriter, who travelled throughout Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and else- where, working with The Mineworker’s Union. The rural South was bitterly pover- ty stricken and massively troubled. The work that Don West was doing was extremely unpopular with the powers that ran the South. He fought racism in places where racism was traditional and institu- tional. He strove to educate in a place where ignorance was used as a tool to sub- jugate and control and he fought for the rights of workers. He was therefore in direct conflict with very powerful and organised capitalist, racist and downright brutal people, who routinely employed scab labour and gun thugs to enforce their way of doing business. Don West was in danger of becoming a victim of violence on many occasions.


Hedy’s performance of The Lament For Barney Graham tells of the murder of the President of the United Mineworker’s Union in Davison, Tennessee in 1930. This came to Hedy via her father as The Davi- son-Wilder Blues and Shut Up In The Mines At Coal Creek. Hedy also recorded Anger In The Land, a poem of her father’s, which she set to music. Don West had written the poem after meeting a black hitchhiker whose brother had been the victim of a racist lynching. It appears first on the sec- ond of two LPs she made for Vanguard.


In 1961, she made her first recordings


for the LP New Folks, which featured The Greenbriar Boys and others. She then made two solo recordings, Hedy West, Accompa- nying Herself On 5 String Banjo and Hedy West, Vol II, released in 1963 and 1965. In 1967, the same year that she released Bal- lads on Topic, she also recorded an LP for Fontana, a record company with much more of a budget than Topic. The record is half traditional songs and half contempo- rary material, and Hedy’s own notes are extremely lucid and illuminating.


“I’m most often called a folksinger. And part of me is. I continue an unbroken family tradition of folksong. That’s com- mon enough with people like us. We’d been British labourers, hard pinched enough to emigrate to America. It was the 18th Century. The rich coastland was


already settled. So we went on farther to the steep country in the southern Appalachian Mountains. We settled down to grub out a living. While America mod- ernised and boomed around us, we lived a hard old way of life. We got tough and strong-willed. We kept our old ways, and we liked them. Folksongs were the musical part of our old ways. We kept on singing them. And they made good entertain- ment, because they had meaning and importance for us – and that’s why I still sing them.”


“A


“Then there’s a part of me that’s in between being, and not being, a folk - singer. And that’s also common enough with people like us. When the time came that even the backwoods couldn’t resist the energy of modern America, trains and cars, telephones, radios, phonographs, movies and TV burst right into the middle of our lives. Things changed whether we liked it or not. And we had to change too, whether we wanted to or not. Some peo- ple tried to stay on farming and some went to work in new industries.”


nd what was happen- ing to our music? We kept on singing the old songs. Why not? We knew them. But we


wrote new songs too. Some were about the new way of life. About millwork, mine work, railroading, truck driving and even about national politics and the stock market. We were hearing new sounds and they weren’t all folk sounds. Some came from vaudeville and music hall. But we didn’t care where they came from. If we like the new sounds we tried to make them too. Our music changed. And I think we liked it.”


“And last, there’s a part of me that’s not folksinger at all. And that’s common enough with people like us. I’ve strayed far from my traditional past. I’ve studied Western European music since I was a child. First piano, then flute. Violin for a while. Later theory and composition. I left my native South after college and lived in New York and Los Angeles, and London and Berlin. This straying is as much a part of me as my original roots”.


“I’m a folk musician who’s not only a folkmusician; a Southerner who’s not just a Southerner; and an American who’s not only an American. But I don’t mind at all: I’m delighted. Because I want to see the other sides. I’ll put my past with my pre- sent, to look at Now from Then and Then from Now, Here from There and There from Here.”


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