Durham, NC · old-time · bluegrass

Alice Gerrard

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Bluegrass Hall of Fame singer, fiddler and guitarist whose 1960s and '70s duo records with Hazel Dickens opened the music to generations of women; she also founded the Old-Time Herald.

Alice Gerrard was born in Seattle in 1934, to a mother from Yakima, Washington and a father from Wigan, England. She studied at Antioch College, where she first encountered folk music, then moved to Washington, D.C. and fell into the city's bluegrass scene, working since the 1960s as a singer, fiddler, guitarist and banjo player in old-time and bluegrass music.

Her recordings with Hazel Dickens, made when few women were fronting bluegrass bands, paired high, unornamented harmony singing with a repertoire drawn from traditional song, coal-country material and songs the pair wrote themselves. The two were among the first women to record bluegrass albums as leaders.

Gerrard was married to Jeremy Foster, with whom she had four children, until his death in a car accident in 1964. She later married musician Mike Seeger, recording two albums with him, and sang alongside Dickens, Tracy Schwarz and Lamar Grier as the Strange Creek Singers.

She founded the Old-Time Herald magazine in 1987 and served as its editor-in-chief until 2000, documenting and teaching old-time music for decades afterward. Her archive, spanning 1954 to 2000, is held at the University of North Carolina's Southern Folklife Collection.

Gerrard was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017 and remains based in North Carolina, still recording and performing with the same spare, direct approach to singing and fiddling that marked her early work. She was the subject of the documentary You Gave Me a Song and has taught regularly at the Augusta Heritage Center and the Port Townsend Festival of American Fiddle Tunes.

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