Alice Gerrard

bluegrass

Alice Gerrard, born July 8, 1934 in Seattle, Washington, is an American old-time and bluegrass singer, guitarist, fiddler and banjo player who has also worked as a writer, editor and teacher in traditional music. She encountered folk music as a student at Antioch College and then moved to Washington, D.C., where she entered the city's bluegrass community. She is best known for her duo recordings with Hazel Dickens, which began with Who's That Knocking (1965) on Folkways and continued through Hazel & Alice (1973) and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (1976) on Rounder, the Smithsonian Folkways retrospective Pioneering Women of Bluegrass (1996) and the archival Sing Me Back Home: The DC Tapes, 1965-1969 (2018) on Free Dirt Records. The pair's unadorned harmony singing and original songs became a reference point for later generations of women in bluegrass, and they were inducted together into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017. Gerrard also made two albums with her second husband, Mike Seeger, including Mike and Alice Seeger Live in Japan (1970), and appeared on a 1970 album by the Strange Creek Singers alongside Dickens, Tracy Schwarz and Lamar Grier. She has played on more than twenty recordings with traditional musicians such as the North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell. Away from performing she founded The Old Time Herald and was its editor-in-chief from 1987 to 2000. Her solo albums include Pieces of My Heart (1994), Calling Me Home: Songs of Love and Loss (2002), Bittersweet (2013), Follow the Music (2014) on Tompkins Square and Sun to Sun (2023), issued by the Durham, North Carolina label Sleepy Cat Records and recorded with younger collaborators including fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves and multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook. Her honors include an IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award and the North Carolina Folklore Society's Tommy Jarrell Award, and her life and music are the subject of the documentary You Gave Me a Song. Now in her nineties, she continues to perform and to teach at summer music camps, and a memoir drawing on her personal photo archive is due from UNC Press.

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