At the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola during their first trip, they recorded Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) who went on to become a successful and influential performer of traditional African-American music.

They were responsible for introducing American audiences to other folk musicians and blues artists such as Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, Josh White and Burl Ives.

She entered the University of Texas at fifteen and the following year assisted her father, John, her brother, Alan and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger with their book, Our Singing Country (1941).

After the end of the war, she and her family moved to Boston where she wrote songs for Walter A. O'Brien's 1949 mayoral campaign including "M.T.A.," co-written with Jacqueline Steiner.

In the 1950s, she moved to California, where she taught guitar, banjo, mandolin and folk singing through UCLA Extension courses, at the Idyllwild summer arts program and, starting in 1963, at San Fernando Valley State College.

It's extremely important for the psychic health and well-being of Americans to maintain all of these little regional distinctions, to establish a cultural pluralism.

It's like my brother, folklorist Alan Lomax, wrote one time: 'If the cultural gray-out continues around the world, pretty soon there will be no place worth visiting ... and no particular reason to stay home, either.'

Bess Lomax Hawes was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina and the National Medal of Arts in 1993 awarded by President Bill Clinton.

While a faculty member at California State University Northridge, Hawes compiled an extensive archive of folk songs that were gathered by her students in Los Angeles and abroad.