Biography
Harriet Elizabeth Wood entered the world in Washington, D.C., during 1922 and later performed under the professional name Hally Wood. Her father, a U.S. Army physician, guided the family through repeated relocations nationwide before they settled in San Antonio, Texas, where he retired and soon perished in an accident. While enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin for music studies, she encountered John Lomax, his son Alan Lomax, and the aspiring radio personality John Henry Faulk. Possessing perfect pitch along with other notable abilities, she cultivated a deep interest in folklore, particularly folk music, during those years. She wed Faulk in 1940 and maintained a close professional association with the Lomaxes, most intensively with Alan, across the following four decades. After World War II concluded, she relocated to New York City and formed connections with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Jean Ritchie, Leadbelly, and additional figures in the folk community. The marriage to Faulk ended in divorce in 1947. She subsequently entered a union with Lou Gordon, a Spanish Civil War veteran who had served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and later helped establish the Woody Guthrie Children's Fund. During that time she resided in New York City and on Long Island, performing only sporadically, until returning to Austin in 1953 to dissolve her second marriage. The University of Texas then engaged her to transcribe its collection of Lomax field recordings while she completed her long-delayed degree. In the mid-1950s she returned once more to New York, supporting herself through secretarial work and participating briefly in the vocal quartet the Skifflers alongside Milt Okun and Leon Bibb. Following her third marriage, to Robert Clarence McCleod Stevenson, a department head at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, she settled in Puerto Rico. Although she maintained occasional musical activity, she remained largely removed from the late-1950s and early-1960s folk revival even as her husky, powerful voice and her work as both composer and interpreter shaped many of its participants; her version of “Mary Hamilton,” drawn from several traditional sources, emerged as the most widely recognized during that period. She contributed to multiple Folkways albums and devoted herself seriously to collecting folk songs in addition to performing and composing. In 1989, at age 66, she succumbed to lung cancer.