(1950 - 10 December 2010) (his death) (2 children)
In the early 1940s Ritchie's future husband George Pickow 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 summer camp in upstate New York. The Brooklyn-born Pickow, who had studied painting at Cooper Union and made training films for the Navy in World War II, went on to have a long career as a professional photographer and film maker. His career also included an extensive documentation of his wife's work and his photographs illustrated many of her books. Pickow and Ritchie met in 1948 at a square dance at the Henry Street Settlement. The following day, Pickow invited her to accompany him on a photo shoot at the Fulton Fish Market. "The result — Ms. Ritchie perched on the hood of a truck, holding a rather large lobster — was published in a trucking-industry magazine." They married in 1950 and had two sons, Peter and Jon. In 1952, Pickow accompanied his wife on a Fulbright Scholarship to collect folksongs in Britain and Ireland. 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. The result was the acclaimed 16-minute color film Oss Oss Wee Oss (1953). In 1961, Pickow and Lomax collaborated on a short film documentary about the Greenwich Village folk revival scene intended to be shown on the BBC. 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" of performances by Clarence Ashley, Guy Carawan, Willie Dixon, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, 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. In the audience are Maria Muldaur and also Bob Dylan, who can be seen clog dancing in the film's opening moments. Pickow, who had been in declining health for a long time, died December 10, 2010, two days after Ritchie's 88th birthday.