Winner of a 2001 NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) National
Heritage Fellowship Award.
She was the first woman awarded the International Bluegrass Music Association's Merit Award in 1994.
She moved to Baltimore, Maryland in the 1950s and worked in factories there. She began playing music and singing with Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard.
She was one of eleven children in Mercer County, West Virginia. Daughter of a Primitive Baptist preacher and singer who hauled timber to support the family. Her brothers were miners and one of her sisters cleaned the house for the mine supervisor.