Born in East Liverpool Ohio, in 1901, Ruth Crawford was first taught piano by her mother after which she studied at the School of Musical Art in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1920 she enrolled at the American Conservatory in Chicago, where she studied composition with Adolf Weidig and piano with Heniot Levy. She became a teacher there in 1921, and also supported herself by working as a usher in local theatres.
Early Compositions
Some of her early works include Five Preludes for Piano ( 1924-25), Suite for Small Orchestra (1926) and Four Preludes for Piano, composed in 1927-28. She continued to teach piano at the American Conservatory from 1924 to 1929, and she taught at the Elmhurst [Illinois] College of Music, where the children of poet Carl Sandburg were her pupils Ruth wrote the piano accompaniments to some of Sandburg's songs from American Songbag in 1927. In the summer of 1929 Crawford lived at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where she became acquainted with American composer Marion Bauer. That fall she began lessons with Charles Seeger (1886-1979) in New York City..Crawford received her master's degree in 1929
List of Compositions
In 1930 Ruth composed a song, Rat Riddles, with words by Sandburg, which later became the first of Three Songs for contralto, oboe, piano and percussion, and also produced Piano Study in Mixed Accents, and four Diaphonic Suites for various instrumental groups. These compositions led to her being awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for study in Europe, where she became acquainted with such composers as Ravel, Bartok and Alban Berg. During that year Crawford produced Chants for women's chorus (1930), String Quartet (1930-31) and the second of the Three Songs, "In Tall Grass "(1931).
After returning to the Unites States Ruth married Charles Seeger on October 3,1932. That year Ruth wrote a song, Sacco, Vanzetti as well as Chinaman, Laundryman, and Prayers of Steel, which became the third of the previously composed Three Songs. In 1933 her Three Songs were performed at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Amsterdam, Holland.
Crawford-Seeger contributed, along with John and Allan Lomax, to the anthology Our Singing Country in 1941 and during the following years transcribed over a thousand songs which she found at the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song.She became a specialist in folk music for the young and published American Folk Songs for Children in Home, School and Nursery School (1948), Animal Folk Songs for Children (1950) and Christmas Folk Songs for Children (1953).
The mother of four, Mona, Penelope, Peggy and Michael, Ruth was also the stepmother to folk singer Pete Seeger. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1953 and died in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the same year.
Source
Notable American Women, The Modern Period, edited by Sicherman and Green,The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980.
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