Ruth Crawford Seeger is known for her systematic and analytical approaches to composing, transcribing, and teaching. At the same time, her work in these fields has been characterized as warm, spontaneous, and intuitive. Though appearing to represent opposing polarities, these descriptors are fundamental to the makeup of Crawford Seeger's character, as can be demonstrated through an examination of her music, her writing, her children's folk song anthologies, and the comments of friends and family. How different this picture is from the one filling my mind thirty years ago—that of a woman composer whose gifts were never fully realized due to an oppressively sexist society, a Victorian husband, and the challenge of raising four children. The more I have learned about Ruth Crawford Seeger, the more I realize how much more complex she is than that stereotypical image of the oppressed woman composer might suggest. Much has been made of the conflicts she experienced between her folk music work and her music composition, yet very little has been said about her teaching. While these varied roles often competed with each other and at times led to considerable frustration, she did not simply give up composing in order to teach children. My goal in this chapter is to challenge the rigid separation we ascribe to “composer” and “teacher,” which consequently limits our understanding of the relationship between artistry and scholarship.

A good portion of this particular argument rests in rehabilitating teaching as an activity and mode of thinking that is simultaneously creative and analytic; intuitive and systematic; and solitary and interpersonal. Working from the assumption common in educational theory that teaching is both an art and a science, I will reexamine the musical and educational value of Crawford Seeger's pedagogical works that to date have received insufficient attention from scholars. I propose that her compositional credo and folk song transcription principles can be found in her teaching materials, demonstrating that her teaching was as scholarly as her transcriptions, and as creative as her compositions.

Crawford Seeger began her public life as a composer in the mid-1920s before becoming a folk music scholar/transcriber in 1937 and finally a teacher in 1941.