Jean Redpath MBE (28 April 1937 – 21 August 2014) was a Scottish folk singer, educator and musician. Career Jean Redpath was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to musical parents. Her mother knew many Scots songs and passed them on to Jean and her brother, and her father played the hammered dulcimer. She was raised in Leven, Fife, Scotland, and later returned to Edinburgh, taking medieval studies at the University of Edinburgh. To help pay her way through her studies, she sang for beer money and undertook part-time work as a driving instructor and undertaker's assistant. The Scottish poet and folk-song collector Hamish Henderson was working in the School of Scottish Studies at the university and Redpath took a keen interest in the archive of tapes and discs of music and songs. She learned about 400 songs, together with the oral folklore that went with them. In March 1961, at the age of 24, she arrived in the United States with just eleven dollars in her pocket. Her first performance was in San Francisco. Later she met up with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village. The natural warmth and power of her voice brought her to perform at Gerde's Folk City. In 1963, following a concert performance, she signed with Elektra Records. In 1975, she switched to the Philo label. From 1972 to 1976, Redpath was artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She lectured in folklore and acted as cultural resource in the local school system. In 1976, Redpath embarked on a project to record all the songs of Robert Burns, some being folk songs, some Burns's own compositions, and most a mixture of the two. Twenty-two volumes were planned, but when her collaborator, the composer Serge Hovey, died after seven volumes, the project came to a premature end. Hovey had done the instrumental arrangements for 323 songs, and Redpath felt no other musician could replace him. The albums won critical praise from around the world. In 1986, she recorded Lady Nairne, a collection of songs written by Scottish women. Redpath sensitively reconstructed songs that might otherwise have been lost. Between 1974 and 1987, Redpath appeared regularly on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" APM radio show. She also appeared on Robert J. Lurtsema's "Morning pro musica" broadcast from WGBH in Boston. Redpath toured throughout the U.S. and Canada, played venues in South America, Hong Kong, and