Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) was an American composer and musicologist, known for collecting folk music, as well as for her own strikingly modernist compositions. The first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, she went to Europe in 1930 and began the period of her greatest activity, composing Three Chants and the String Quartet 1931, her best-known work. Studying withCharles Seeger and marrying him in 1932, Crawford Seeger devoted time to raising her family of Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger, all to become famous folk singers. In the year before her death, she resumed composition with the Suite for Wind Quintet.