[via Associated Press]

She sang with Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger. She co-wrote the Kingston Trio hit “M.T.A.” And she spent a life documenting American folklore music for film and recordings. Bess Lomax Hawes, daughter of legendary folk musicologist John Lomax, died of natural causes at the age of 88 this past Friday.

It was in the 1940s that she’d join forces with Guthrie and Seeger to form the loose-knit Almanac Singers, who wrote a slew of song that were usually in support of the union movements. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, as an anthropology professor at California State University, Northside, she made several documentary films exploring American Music and folklore. She was also awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.

She was also a tireless guitar, banjo, and mandolin teacher. To give you a bit of color to Hawes’ personality, here’s a snippet from a recent Huffinton Post article:

In the late 1940s, she and her husband Butch were living in the Boston area and sent their three children to a cooperative nursery school organized by graduate students at MIT and Harvard. She frequently brought her guitar to the school to perform for the students. Some of the parents, mostly the mothers, asked her to teach them how to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Bess agreed to charge them one dollar each for each lesson, which lasted several hours, what she called “a whole evening.” She would keep 50 cents for herself to pay for a babysitter and she’d donate the other 50 cents to the nursery school. Word soon spread, and others began to join her classes.

Rest in peace, Bess Lomax Hawes. Here’s a song from the Almanac Singers (you can see a young Bess in the album art presenting here, she’s third from the left):

And here is a clip from one of the documentary films she made:

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