Written with unique insight and compassion, this bookoffers the definitive treatment of a fascinating twentieth-century figure. It was only at the very end of her life, with cancer sapping her strength, that she returned to composing. The first woman to win a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in music composition, Crawford Seeger nearly gave up writing music as the demands of family, politics, and the folk song movement intervened. Radicalized by the Depression, she spent much of the ensuing two decades working aggressively for social change with her husband and stepson, the folksinger Pete Seeger.This engrossing new biography emphasizes the choices Crawford Seeger made in her roles as composer, activist, teacher, wife and mother. Collaborating with poet Carl Sandburg on folk songarrangements in the twenties, and with the famous folk-song collectors John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s, she emerged as a central figure in the American folk music revival, issuing several important books of adaptations (transcriptions and arrangements) and pioneering the use of American folk songsin children's music education. But her legacy extends far beyond the cutting edge of modern music. Joining Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell as a key member of the 1920s musical avant-garde, she went on to study with modernist theorist and future husband Charles Seeger, writing her masterpiece, String Quartet 1931, not long after. Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) is frequently considered the most significant American female composer in this century.

Ruth Crawford Seeger by Judith Tick