Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007

Subject: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: GUEST,Mary Katherine
Date: 12 Dec 07 - 04:53 PM

Sorry to pass along the sad news from Mike Seeger that eminent folklorist Henrietta Yurchenko died on December 10.

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: Nerd
Date: 12 Dec 07 - 11:27 PM

We were very sad to hear this at the American Folklife Center. We have most of her collections in our archive...a great collector of traditional music!

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: RoyH (Burl)
Date: 13 Dec 07 - 10:56 AM

We people in the folk revival owe a huge debt to the collectors. As Nerd says, she was a great collector. Thank You Ms Yurchenko. R I P. Burl

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 13 Dec 07 - 11:25 AM

By the way, her last name was spelled Yurchenco.

She was an amazing collector, author of the first biography of Woody Guthrie, and also a pioneer in folk music radio. She began working as a producer/host in an age when few women were involved in those aspects of radio. She was the first person to broadcast Pete Seeger. In her final years she became involved with internet broadcasting and presented fascinating programs.

She was a rare individual, and I don't think she was fully recognized for that she contributed to the folk music revival.

Ron Olesko

Ron Olesko's Folk Music Notebook

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: Nerd
Date: 13 Dec 07 - 11:36 AM

Yes, Ron is right about her last name, and about the rest too....

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: Anglo
Date: 13 Dec 07 - 02:07 PM

So sorry to hear this. In the 70s and 80s I used to run into her on visits to NYC, at places like the Eagle Tavern which hosted traditional singers, or one of the Irish sessions in the days before sessions were common. I often enjoyed the overnight hospitality of her couch. She was a lovely generous lady. I'd hoped to see her again before she passed, but alas it was not to be. Sleep in peace, Henrietta.

Subject: OBIT-Henrietta Yurchenco
From: GUEST,Sheila
Date: 15 Dec 07 - 12:31 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/arts/14yurchenco.html

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: Art Thieme
Date: 15 Dec 07 - 11:10 PM

Hers is a name I've heard ever since I first delved into things folk; first from a recoding of an old Pete Seeger concert on Folkways Records, I think it was, where Pete mentions her by name and takes note that she is in attendance that day. In reality, though, I've learned more about Henrietta Yurchenco in this thread than in all the long years that followed my first introduction to her. It strikes me, now, that it is quite sad that I missed out knowing more about her while she was here.

Rest in peace!

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenco December 2007
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 17 Jan 08 - 02:43 PM

Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91
by DOUGLAS MARTIN for The New York Times
Published: December 14, 2007

Henrietta Yurchenco, whose quest to save living music from the past took her from the mountains of Guatemala and southern Mexico to a New York City radio station to the Jewish community of Morocco, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.

The cause was lung failure, her son, Peter, said.

Like a linguist nailing down a dying language, Ms. Yurchenco, an ethnomusicologist, recorded music from long ago that faced an unclear tomorrow. In an interview, Pete Seeger said she "went to places people didn't believe she would be able to find."

Among her thousands of recordings are ritual songs from North, South and Central American Indians, including peyote chants, and music celebrating everything from love to agriculture, found from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean to Appalachia to Spain.

Oscar Brand, the folk singer and radio personality, citing her work with Native Americans, said, "She went out of her way to discover the soft spots, the shining things you couldn't see in the mists back in the mountains."

Ms. Yurchenco was also a radio producer, announcer and interviewer. Beginning in the 30s, she broadcast only folk music, both traditional and modern, at a time when few knew it.

Woody Guthrie called her in 1939 or 1940 and asked if he could be on her live show. Bob Dylan, a little tongue-tied, did one of his early radio interviews with her in 1962. In an interview with NPR in 1999, she said she scoured union halls and immigrant groups to find genuine music.

Ethnomusicologists study music in varying ethnic contexts. Ms. Yurchenco began by tracking down 14 all-but-unknown Mexican and Guatemalan tribes, reaching them with little but a mule and 300 pounds of recording equipment. She eventually recorded 2,000 of their songs for the Library of Congress.

Later, she studied the music of the Sephardim, Jews who had been thrown out of Spain in the 15th century. She arrived in Morocco just as many Sephardim were preparing to move to the new state of Israel, and she seized a last chance to capture their ancient songs in the original context.

Ms. Yurchenco was intrigued by women's roles in creating music and of the sexual politics involved in making it. Mr. Seeger said women may be the best music collectors, partly because many have the patience to appreciate a grandmother singing a 400-year-old ballad to a baby.

Ms. Yurchenco wrote several books, including a biography of Woody Guthrie. At least one book is still to be published: a study of the music of Morocco's Sephardic women. She long taught at City College, lectured widely and fought fiercely for her leftist ideals.

Starting in 2005 and continuing almost until her death, Ms. Yurchenco invited like-minded friends to her apartment to sing songs against the Iraq war, often the same ones used against the Vietnam War. Some of their singing was broadcast on Internet radio.

Henrietta Weiss was born in New Haven on March 22, 1916. She told The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper in Manhattan, that her father was "a dreamer who started out in business and failed miserably." She was a promising pianist who attended the Yale School of Music.

At Yale, she met Basil Yurchenco, an Argentine-born painter, at a meeting of the John Reed Club, named for the American writer who chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution. They were married in 1936, the year she was first arrested in a protest; she was demonstrating against a brass band from Mussolini's Italy.

In 1939, her musical interests led her to WNYC, the public radio station then owned by New York City. She made friends with people like Burl Ives, the folk singer and Alan Lomax, a legendary music collector.

In 1941, she followed her husband on a trip to Mexico. An engineer from WNYC came along to record music, and she took over when he left. With financial support from groups like the American Philosophical Society, she repeatedly visited the area to record animal sacrifices, healing ceremonies and much else. Scorpions, both yellow and green, were a persistent problem.

Ms. Yurchenco and her husband divorced in 1955. In addition to her son, Peter, of Skillman, N.J., she is survived by two grandchildren.

Legend has it that Mr. Seeger and the Almanac Singers, an earlier name for the Weavers, wrote the song "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" in Ms. Yurchenco's relatively quiet bathroom during a noisy party in her apartment. Mr. Seeger said that was not quite true, though he recalled her famous parties.

Mr. Seeger explained that Leadbelly, the great folk and blues artist, was in Ms. Yurchenco's bathroom with the singer Sam Kennedy, who perched on the obvious as he sang "Drimmin Down," a lament about a dead cow. (Leadbelly later livened up the beat and used the tune for his own cow song, "If It Wasn't for Dicky.")

Mr. Seeger liked the melody and added lyrics about wine.

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 17 Jan 08 - 02:50 PM

Also of interest:

http://www.henriettayurchenco.com/

Around the World in 80 Years. A Memoir – A Musical Odyssey by Henrietta Yurchenco, Published by the MRI Press January 2003

photo from From Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music (National Geographic Books, June 2003) - which sounds like an interesting book...

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: Obit: Henrietta Yurchenko December 2007
From: Newport Boy
Date: 11 Feb 08 - 01:16 PM

Another obituary (a little late) from the Guardian today:

Henrietta Yurchenco

Folk-music champion of the Americas
Ken Hunt
Monday February 11, 2008

Henrietta Yurchenco, who has died aged 91 in Manhattan, was a linchpin of the New York folk scene, broadcasting programmes and championing the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Huddie Ledbetter and Pete Seeger at critical times in their careers. She came to be one of the world's most renowned ethno-musicologists, recording social and ritual, traditional and so-called primitive music in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, Morocco, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Ecuador and elsewhere. Her writings ranged widely. Subjects included the first major biography of Woody Guthrie (1970), skinhead songs in the US and Britain, Romanian music, and Judaeo-Hispanic song, stories and proverbs.

She was born Henrietta Weiss in New Haven, Connecticut, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who both sang (her father also played the mandolin). She studied piano at Yale School of Music, describing the instrument as "the only thing I've ever been terrified of in my life". In 1936 she married the Argentine-born painter Boris Yurchenco and moved to New York. That was also the year of her first arrest - for protesting against a Mussolini-sanctioned brass band playing in New Haven. Into her late 80s, she was still attending protests against the US involvement in Iraq. In New York, her social circle came to include Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Otto Klemperer, Pablo Neruda, the painter Frida Kahlo and the folk-music collector Alan Lomax.

After abandoning plans to become a concert pianist, Yurchenco took a job as a broadcaster with radio station WNYC. This was a time when female broadcasters were a rarity and it placed her in a key position for the city's burgeoning, predominately left-leaning folk scene, whose circle included Guthrie, Aunt Mollie Jackson, Leadbelly, Seeger and Josh White. Her Adventures in Music show aired their music. In her 2003 autobiography Around the World in 80 Years, she wrote: "Their songs tracked every aspect of life from the history of their struggles to the intimate details of their private lives." Characteristically, in 1941, she brokered the forerunner of the Weavers, the Almanac Singers' Sod- Buster Ballads and Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads.

Aged 21, Yurchenco and her husband travelled to some of the remotest parts of Mexico. Using what was then state-of-art equipment - portable at a mere 200-300lb - they recorded the sounds of native Mexican peoples, such as the Cora, Huichol, Seri, Tzotozil and Yaqui, who had always lived cut off from mainstream society. Even now, with the possible exception of that of the Yaqui - a people made famous through the writings of Carlos Castaneda - this music sounds otherworldly. Yurchenco's recordings from that and later trips to Mexico and Guatemala between 1942 and 1946 resulted in such releases as Folk Music of Mexico (1948) for the Library of Congress and Indian Music of Mexico (1952). There was also, in 1968, her Latin American Children's Game Songs Recorded in Puerto Rico and Mexico. Her most commercially successful album was The Real Mexico (1966).

Similarly, Yurchenco's 1983 Folkways album Ballads, Wedding Songs and Piyyutim from the Sephardic Jews of Morocco - piyyutim are Hebrew religious poems by medieval Jewish poet-philosophers - was acclaimed. Largely a women's music tradition, it was the subject of her book, In Their Own Voices: Women in the Judeo-Hispanic Song and Story (2007). Divorced from her husband in 1955, Yurchenko is survived by her son Peter and two grandchildren.

Henrietta Yurchenco, folklorist, broadcaster and writer, born March 22 1916; died December 10 2007


Phil