Jean Ritchie's Celebration of Life

Jean Ritchie's Celebration of Life It is right to speak well of Jean Ritchie and her Celebration of Life ( Geordie Music Publishing, Inc., 1971) although she has no great need for our well speaking. Her whole career as folk singer, student of folk music, and writer has been a celebration —a well speaking—of life, more particularly life as she knew it in Perry County, Kentucky , as a member of The Singing Family of the Cumberlands with their close family ties and love for the traditional folk songs handed down from generation to generation. The publishers describe Celebration of Life as a song-folio, but this is hardly adeqaute because it includes many pictures, poems and comment, in addition to words and music for the songs that range from the traditional to original compositions. It becomes very definitely autobiographical. Some comment about each of these seems appropriate . There are many fine pictures, presumably almost all of them, made by Jean's husband , George Pickow. A series of them focus on Jean herself and highlight stages in her life before and during her life as a public figure. Other pictures touch on a variety of aspects of life in the hills—mines, moonshining, baptizing, shaking the cat in the quilt, family re-unions, church, sorghum stir-offs, auctions, company houses, milking, etc. Jean's poems have more value as autobiography than as Grade A poetic art. They record the growth and maturity of a sensitive and compassionate woman. The songs are divided between a variety of traditional songs—play party, love and separation, and humor, etc.—and Jean's original compositions. Her better songs seem more artistic than her poems perhaps because they develop from her earliest musical and poetic instincts nurtured by her family's singing of traditional English and Scottish ballads and songs. But the full value of Celebration of Life emerges best of all when Jean Ritchie with her dulcimers, auto harp, and guitar performs selections from it in her concerts. Comments on the singing of Edna Pitchie (Jean's sister) described it as belonging to an earlier tradition than now current in the area and speak of her performances as being "alive with the spirit of the Cumberlands—a gentle magic, softly veiled in reminiscence." This seems largely true of Jean Ritchie's singing even though she has songs that can be called "protest" songs, of which "Black Waters" is such a fine example, and through it all runs the sincerity of remembering she is Jean Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky. One could hardly imagine Jean Ritchie building a swimming pol in the shape of a dulcimer, auto harp, or guitar. 52 ...