Trivia

She was an accomplished Appalachian Dulcimer in Kentucky and Brooklyn, New York.

Mother of two sons, Jon Pickow of Viper, Kentucky and Peter Pickow; Sister-in-law of Lenette Pickow.

Port Washington, Long Island, New York (December 2010)

She was the youngest of 14 children in a farming family in the foothills of the Cumberlands.

She earned a bachelor's degree in social work from the University of Kentucky in 1946. She moved to New York, where she worked at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. She began performing at Greenwich Village coffeehouses. She came to the attention of folklorist Alan Lomax and Mitch Miller, each of whom arranged for her earliest recordings.

In 1952, she received a Fulbright scholarship that enabled her to travel to Great Britain to study the roots of her musical folk heritage. In 2002, she received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the USA's highest award in the traditional arts. She performed several times at the Newport Folk Festival, from its beginning in 1959.