Hedy West
| Hedy West | |
|---|---|
West performing at Newport Folk Festival, 1964
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Hedwig Grace West |
| Born | April 6, 1938 |
| Origin | Cartersville, Georgia |
| Died | July 3, 2005 (aged 67) |
| Genres | Folk music |
| Occupation(s) | Singer, songwriter |
| Instruments | Vocals, banjo |
| Years active | 1961–2005 |
Hedy West (April 6, 1938 – July 3, 2005) was an American folksinger and songwriter.
West belonged to the same generation of folk revivalists as Joan Baez and Judy Collins. Her most famous song "500 Miles" is one of America's most popular folk songs. She was described by the English folk musician A. L. Lloyd as "far and away the best of American girl singers in the [folk] revival."
Hedy West played the guitar and the banjo. She played both clawhammer style and a unique type of three-finger picking that exhibited influences outside of bluegrass and old-time, such as blues and jazz.
She was born Hedwig Grace West in Cartersville in the mountains of northern Georgia in 1938. Her father, Don West, was a southern poet and 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. He co-founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, and later ran the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia.
Her great-uncle Augustus Mulkey played the fiddle; her paternal grandmother Lillie Mulkey West played the banjo. By her teens West was singing at folk festivals, both locally and in neighboring states. In the mid-50s she won a prize for ballad-singing in Nashville, TN. Many of her songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from Lillie West, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child. She used her father's poetry in several songs, such as "Anger in the Land".
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