LISA NULL

(1942 – 2002)

Ballad singer extraordinaire 

Lisa Null was a mainstay and an inspiration for singers and folk music fans across the world for more than 50 years. She performed in many of the English-speaking countries, and collected folksongs in North America, Ireland, and Great Britain.

Lisa had a deep, scholarly interest in traditional songs. She had a background in folklore and history, both of which she taught at Georgetown University for several years.  In addition to being a performer and teacher, she was also is a “song-catcher” who traveled to Ireland to help record Seamus Ennis, the great folklore collector and master of the Irish bagpipes. Ennis urged her to explore the wonderful but neglected trove of American-Irish traditional songs, which established an important part of her repertoire. She also composed topical songs in traditional forms, good-time “chorus” songs, and old-timey country numbers.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Lisa developed an international reputation singing throughout the United States, Canada, and England. She appeared several times on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” In the early 1970s, she co-founded Green Linnet, the celebrated Irish music record label, in partnership with the folksinger and master uilleann pipe maker, Pat Sky. Green Linnet operated out of her house until the mid 1980s, when she moved from Connecticut to Washington, DC, and transferred ownership of the company to Wendy Newton.

In the early 2000s, a struggle with cancer and other health issues forced Lisa to put her musical career on hold for more than a decade. She toured again, playing festivals in British Columbia, North Carolina, New England, and Maryland. With singers Peter Brice and Judy Cook, she revived a corpus of topical songs from the War of 1812 for the conflict’s bicentennial anniversary.

In the last decade of her life, Lisa released a two-CD album, Legacies, of favorite traditional songs as well as her own newer songs and instrumental compositions. Lisa died surrounded by her friends in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2022.