Blessed with a mezzo-soprano that remained sweet yet carried a faint rasp, as delicate as mist yet as evocative as the highlands, Jean Redpath earned recognition as one of the foremost interpreters of Scottish traditional song. She also distinguished herself as a folk-music ethnographer who helped revive nearly forgotten Scottish material and held a lecturing post at Stirling University from 1979 onward, while appearing regularly at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and at other distinguished venues that included Harvard.
She entered the world in Fife country beyond Edinburgh. Her father performed on hammered dulcimer, and her mother possessed deep knowledge of Scottish oral history, much of it transmitted through songs passed from mother to daughter. As one of four daughters, each received this repertoire directly from their mother. Redpath later drew on that early familiarity when she enrolled at the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh and undertook systematic research into her country’s ballads and compositions.
She moved to New York in 1961 and began performing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Redpath also presented formal programs, among them appearances at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, and rapidly gained wide favor on the folk circuit. Listeners responded both to the distinctive sensitivity of her voice and to the command she displayed over a repertoire exceeding four hundred songs, as well as to the commentary she supplied between numbers.
Her first appearance at the New School for Social Research occurred in 1963 and led to a recording contract with Elektra, for whom she worked until 1975 before moving to the Vermont-based Philo label. There she became one of folk music’s most prolific artists. A major undertaking was the effort to commit to disc every song written by Scotland’s poet laureate Robert Burns; although twenty-two volumes had been projected, only seven were finished before the death of producer Serge Hovey. Additional series included a collection of Scottish songs composed by women, among them Lady Nairne, issued in 1986.
Beyond the studio and the stage, Redpath was heard on Boston’s WGBH public-radio program Morning Pro Musica and served as a regular guest on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion from 1974 to 1987. She died of cancer in an Arizona hospice in August 2014 at the age of seventy-seven.
