On banjo, she played both clawhammer style and a unique type of three-finger picking that showed influences beyond old-time and bluegrass such as blues and jazz.

[1] Her father, Don West, was a Southern poet and coal mine labor organizer in the 1930s; his bitter experiences included a friend killed.

[4] He co-founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, and later ran the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia.

While living in Stony Brook, New York, in the late 1970s, she donated her time and talents to numerous benefit concerts for unfashionable causes[which?]

Her working-class mountain roots were in her voice, however, and ran through everything she sang, highlighting the lives of marginalized blue-collar workers including factory girls, servants, struggling farmers, coal miners, and single mothers.

She was embraced by the Greenwich Village folk scene (most likely in no small part due to the fact that she actually came from the tradition they were reviving), and was invited by Pete Seeger to sing alongside him at a Carnegie Hall concert.

[5][10] After being included on the 1961 compilation album New Folks for Vanguard, she soon made two eponymous solo records for the company, enjoying critical praise.

[11] West moved to Los Angeles in 1960, where she continued singing and married her first husband, aerospace engineer Karl Ludloff.

[13] In 1966, she appeared on Pete Seeger's Public Television series Rainbow Quest, in an episode headlined by Mississippi John Hurt.

Then in the early 1990s, following Katz's 1988 death, she moved to Lower Merion Township in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, suburbs, where she spent most of her final years.

[22] West's most famous song was 500 Miles, put together from fragments of a melody she had heard her uncle sing to her back in Georgia.

Another well-known song that she wrote and copyrighted (but which borrows heavily from existing traditional folk material) is "Cotton Mill Girl".

A fine musical legacy is in unreleased recordings, such as a live concert from the 1978 University of Chicago Folk Festival, broadcast in her memory by The Midnight Special program of local radio station WFMT.