Jean Ritchie obituary

American folk singer responsible for a revival of Appalachian musicWhen Jean Ritchie, who has died aged 92, emerged on to the embryonic New York folk scene in the 1940s, her repertoire of family songs from the Anglo-American tradition of the southern Appalachian mountains was seized upon by folksong enthusiasts as proof of the veracity of the old music. It was a tradition that had first been exposed to a wider audience by the English folksong collector Cecil Sharp in 1916-18: indeed, Sharp had n