[2] In the early 1940s, he was introduced to folk music when he heard Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie jamming every night in a tiny cabin at the left-wing Camp Unity in upstate New York.
When Alan Lomax, then working out of London for the BBC, and his collaborator Peter Kennedy of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, decided to document the unique May Eve and May Day Festivals at Padstow in Cornwall, they selected Pickow to be their cameraman.
This never happened, however, and ten years later Alan's daughter Anna Lomax Wood, edited the surviving scraps and fragments in her father's office into a short film, Ballads, Blues, and Bluegrass.
In addition to Ritchie, Ballads, Blues, and Bluegrass features what one reviewer called "killer footage" [3] of performances by Clarence Ashley, Guy Carawan, Willie Dixon, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Roscoe Holcomb, Peter La Farge, Ernie Marrs, The New Lost City Ramblers, Memphis Slim, and the first known footage of a very young Doc Watson.
Despite apocryphal tales, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers affirms that Bob Dylan is not the male clog dancer at the beginning of the film.