1. Hedwig Grace "Hedy" West was an American folksinger, songwriter and song catcher.
19 Facts About Hedy West
1. 2.
Hedy West belonged to the same generation of folk revivalists as Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Carolyn Hester.
3.
Hedy West is a 2022 inductee to the Georgia Women of Achievement.
4.
Hedy West was born in Cartersville in the mountains of northern Georgia in 1938.
5.
Hedy West's father, Don West, was a Southern poet and coal mine labor organizer in the 1930s; his bitter experiences included a friend killed.
6.
Hedy West co-founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, and later ran the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia.
7.
Many of her songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from Lillie Hedy West, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child.
8.
Hedy West used her father's poetry in several songs, such as "Anger in the Land".
9.
Hedy West graduated from Murphy High School in 1955 and attended Western Carolina College.
10.
Hedy West embraced her folk side and started performing it around New York City.
11.
Hedy West later attributed some of her ability to get 'inside' her songs to her early training as an actress.
12.
Hedy West was embraced by the Greenwich Village folk scene, and was invited by Pete Seeger to sing alongside him at a Carnegie Hall concert.
13.
Hedy West moved to Los Angeles in 1960, where she continued singing and married her first husband, aerospace engineer Karl Ludloff.
14.
Hedy West then lived in London for several years, making tours of the country's folk clubs, and appearing at the Cambridge festival and the first Keele folk festival as well as regular visits to Europe, especially Germany.
15.
Hedy West developed a close working relationship at the time with the painter Gertrude Degenhardt, who illustrated a German-published collection of Hedy West's songs.
16.
Hedy West picked her elderly grandparents' brains for scraps of musical memory.
17.
Hedy West was an adjunct professor at Stony Brook, teaching two courses in folk music.
18.
One of her students, singer-songwriter Robin Greenstein, worked with Hedy West cataloging her record and tape collection.
19.
Hedy West died of cancer on July 3,2005, at a hospital in Philadelphia.