Sangin Womens

Barbara Dane is an American folk, blues, and jazz singer, guitarist, record producer, and political activist. She co-founded Paredon Records with Irwin Silber.

Roscoe Holcomb, was an American singer, banjo player, and guitarist from Daisy, Kentucky. A prominent figure in Appalachian folk music, Holcomb was the inspiration for the term "high, lonesome sound," coined by folklorist and friend John Cohen. The "high lonesome sound" term is now used to describe bluegrass singing, although Holcomb was not, strictly speaking, a bluegrass performer.

Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten (née Nevills) (January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was an American blues and folk musician, singer, and songwriter.

A self-taught left-handed guitarist, Cotten developed her own original style. She played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down, as she was left-handed. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking".

Cotten was born in 1893 to a musical family near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in an area that would later be incorporated as Carrboro. Her parents were George Nevill (also spelled Nevills) and Louisa (or Louise) Price Nevill. Elizabeth was the youngest of five children. She named herself on her first day of school, when the teacher asked her name, because at home she was only called "Li'l Sis." At age 7, she began to play her older brother's banjo. "From that day on," she said, "nobody had no peace in that house". By the age of 8, she was playing songs. At age 9, she was forced to quit school and began work as a domestic. At the age of 11, after scraping together some money, she bought her own guitar. The guitar, a Sears and Roebuck brand instrument, cost $3.75 (equivalent to $107 in 2019). Although self-taught, she became proficient at playing the instrument, and her repertoire included a large number of rags and dance tunes.

Hedy West (April 6, 1938 – July 3, 2005) was an American folksinger and songwriter. She 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 a friend killed. He co-founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, and later ran the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia.

John Jacob Niles was an American composer, singer and collector of traditional ballads. Called the "Dean of American Balladeers," Niles was an important influence on the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, with Odetta, Joan Baez, Burl Ives, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, among others, recording his songs.

Judith Anne "Judy" Henske was an American singer and songwriter, dubbed "the Queen of the Beatniks" by producer Jack Nitzsche. Initially performing in folk clubs in the early 1960s, her performances and recordings embraced blues, jazz, show tunes, and humorous material. Her 1963 recording of "High Flying Bird" was influential on folk-rock, and her 1969 album Farewell Aldebaran, with husband Jerry Yester, was an eclectic "fusion of folk music, psychedelia, and arty pop".

Michael Hurley (born December 20, 1941) is an American folk singer-songwriter who was essential to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to playing a wide variety of instruments, Hurley is also a cartoonist and a painter.

Hurley's music has been described as "outsider folk".

He was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States. Before starting his recording career Hurley contracted mononucleosis and needed to wait several years until he could sign to a record label. Hurley's debut album, First Songs, was recorded for Folkways Records in 1963, on the same reel-to-reel machine that taped Lead Belly's Last Sessions. He was discovered by blues and jazz historian Frederick Ramsey III, and subsequently championed by boyhood friend Jesse Colin Young, who released his second and third albums on The Youngbloods' Warner Bros. imprint, Raccoon. In the late 1970s, Hurley made three albums for Rounder, all of which have since been reissued on CD. His 1976 LP Have Moicy!, a collaboration with the Holy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones, was named "the greatest folk album of the rock era" by The Village Voice's Robert Christgau.

Fred Neil was an American folk singer-songwriter active in the 1960s and early 1970s. He did not achieve commercial success as a performer and is mainly known through other people's recordings of his material – particularly "Everybody's Talkin'", which became a hit for Harry Nilsson after it was used in the film Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Though highly regarded by contemporary folk singers, he was reluctant to tour and spent much of the last 30 years of his life assisting with the preservation of dolphins.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter, one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land", written in response to the American exceptionalist song "God Bless America".

Ola Belle Reed (August 18, 1916 – August 16, 2002) was an American folk singer, songwriter and banjo player.

Reed was born Ola Wave Campbell in the unincorporated town of Grassy Creek, Ashe County, North Carolina, to Arthur Campbell and Ellen Campbell (née Osborne). She was the fourth of thirteen children.

As a young child, Reed learned the clawhammer-style banjo and with her musical family sang old-time songs from the mountain region where they lived. Several family members on both sides of her family played instruments and sang. Reed's paternal grandfather, Alexander Campbell, played the fiddle. Her father played several instruments including the fiddle, banjo, guitar, and organ. Her uncle, Dockery Campbell, is credited with teaching Reed the clawhammer style. On her mother's side, family member Bob Ingraham taught singing schools and her uncle Herb Osborne was versed in mining songs. Reed learned ballads and songs from her mother and grandmother.

Gilbert Vandine "Cisco" Houston (August 18, 1918 – April 29, 1961) was an American folk singer and songwriter, who is closely associated with Woody Guthrie due to their extensive history of recording together.

Houston was a regular recording artist for Moses Asch's Folkways recording studio. He also performed with such folk/blues musicians as Lead Belly, Sonny Terry, Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers.

Gilbert Vandine Houston was born in Wilmington, Delaware, United States, on August 18, 1918, the second of four children. His father, Adrian Moncure Houston, was a sheet-metal worker. The family moved to California while Houston was still young, and he attended school in Eagle Rock, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.

David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk was an American folk singer. An important figure in the American folk music revival and New York City's Greenwich Village scene in the 1960s, he was nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street".

Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.

A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs include "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (also with Hays), and "Turn! Turn! Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement. "Flowers" was a hit recording for the Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963) while the Byrds had a number one hit with "Turn! Turn! Turn!" in 1965.

Jackson Carey Frank was an American folk musician. He released his first and only album in 1965, produced by Paul Simon. After the release of the record, Frank was plagued by a series of personal issues, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and protracted depression that prevented him from maintaining his career.