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anny Thompson remembers recording with Hedy on Serves ’Em Fine, and being bewildered by the con- straints Hedy put on his playing. She clearly felt and could hear how her traditionally-based music should sound and fought for her vision.


There are very few times when you can detect the classical back- ground in Hedy’s performance of traditional music, but the banjo accompaniment to the exquisite and rare ballad Fair Rosamund is an example. The playing is clearly not traditionally based and sounds and feels more like a classical guitar piece. On Serves ’Em Fine, there is a brief appearance of Hedy’s flute playing and occasionally she would play flute and piccolo on other people’s records.


Martin Carthy remembers being in Macedonia with Dave Swarbrick in the 1960s and meeting up with Hedy. At the time, she was working on a song from Utah, called Kate And The Cowhide. She was experimenting with the time signature, and played it on the banjo in 9/8, a highly improbable exercise for anyone but a very gifted musician. Carthy and Swarbrick were mightily impressed and it became Carthy’s tune for his masterpiece The Famous Flower Of Serving Men and Swarbrick’s fiddle play out on Fairport’s Matty Groves.


Carthy remembers Hedy as beautiful, deeply driven, enor- mously intelligent and implacable “with a wonderful, mischievous idiot hidden inside”.


I wrote recently that I did not consider her banjo playing to be virtuosic, but I have changed my mind with this examination of her work. It’s often hard to capture the strength of someone’s perfor- mance on recordings but live she was bewilderingly good. There are two performances on YouTube, firstly Hedy on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest, playing and singing Little Sadie, which she got from Hobart Bailey of East Kentucky, whom she described as “a hopelessly poverty-stricken, ex-musician and miner. He still has a good mind and musical ability, but no way to better his life. It’s often like that in the Southern mountains now.” Hedy’s frailing on Little Sadie is exquisite, and her calm delivery of the story is beau- tifully measured.


Also on YouTube is a very lo-fi film of a performance of Lee


Tharin’s Barroom or The Cowboy’s Lament, which is a tour-de- force of singing and playing. Martin Carthy has a clear memory of Hedy shifting her right hand position in the middle of the tune and in so doing, radically changing the sound. In this film you can witness the change from frailing to three-finger picking and back again, seamlessly executed. It is however Hedy’s singing which


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