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continues to impress. In this film she is playing with the time of the lyrics against the rock-steady drive of the banjo, as only she could do. What she does makes the lyrics really beguiling. There is not a chance of losing interest when a ballad is presented in this way.
In 1980, the German record company Bear Family released
Hedy’s last commercial recording, the excellent, Love, Hell and Bis- cuits, which contains Lewiston Factory Girls, a tiny gem of a song containing all the hallmarks of Hedy’s art at its best.
T
After this, there were no more commercial releases, but there does exist a late and wonderful project containing recordings of Hedy’s grandmother talking about life in rural Georgia and a series of beautiful performances from Hedy, with additional and excellent fiddle accompaniment. Also intriguing is a ‘lost’ album for Topic – Hedy and Ian ‘Jock’ Manuel performing contrasting British and American versions of ballads.
hroughout her life Hedy was committed to political and social activism. She took part in Southern journeys with black and white musicians during the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s. She was enlightened by both poverty and education and was both a realist and an idealist. She made no concessions to the pursuit of stardom, yet very early in her career managed to have one of her compositions covered by Joan Baez, Bobby Bare, Peter Paul & Mary and The Kingston Trio. That song, 500 Miles, appears on Roseanne Cash’s CD, The List, a record drawn from her father Johnny Cash’s list of the songs he considered to be the 100 Essential American songs.
Having sung, very successfully, at folk song contests all over the South, starting in her early teens, she moved to New York City to study music and drama at Mannes College and Columbia University. In the sleeve notes to Pretty Saro she wrote about her feelings.
“When I arrived in New York, the folk song revival was on, but I found something insulting in the way people looked at the South and in the way Northern youngsters sang songs born in the South. So I took to singing the songs whenever I could, partly to clear up misunderstandings and partly, I suppose to compete with other singers of the folk revival.”
Essentially Hedy was not of the revival, she was part of the ongoing transmission of traditional songs and tunes, but in terms of her success, we’ll let A L Lloyd have the last word: “Hedy West is among the best women singers of the American folksong revival. That ‘among’ is a pretence of objectivity: my private view is that she’s by far the best of the lot”.
Sadly, Hedy died of cancer in 2005. F
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