Biography
The Kossoy Sisters are identical twin sisters (Irene Saletan and Ellen Christenson) who performed American folk and old-time music. Irene sang mezzo-soprano vocal, and Ellen supplied soprano harmony, with Irene on guitar and Ellen playing the five-string banjo in a traditional up-picking technique. Their performances were notable examples of close harmony singing. They began performing professionally in their mid-teens and are esteemed as a significant part of the popular folk music movement that started in the mid-1950s.
Irene and Ellen Kossoy were born on May 11, 1938, in New York City. The twins began singing together at about the age of six, in imitation of harmonies created in the home by their mother and aunt. At age 15, they attended a summer camp at which Pete Seeger and other well-known folk singers often performed, and they developed a life-long attachment to the genre. They quickly discovered the bustling folk music scene in the Greenwich Village section of New York City and mingled with the people who congregated in Washington Square Park.
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The Kossoys attended local schools in New York City and went on to graduate from Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois. Soon after completion of their formal studies, each of the sisters married. Ellen moved to St. Louis and Irene settled in the Boston area. Each of the sisters later divorced, after which they again became housemates. As of 2022, they were retired and living together in Guatemala.
The sisters performed at the very first Newport Folk Festival and, before that, at the 1956 'Bound for Glory' tribute concert for an ailing Woody Guthrie. They sang three of Woody Guthrie's songs, exhibiting "sweet harmonizing," as Pete Seeger later recounted.
Although the sisters never stopped singing, they avoided the commercial music route. In 1956, they recorded their debut album, Bowling Green and Other Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains. They then waited until 2002 before releasing their follow-up album, Hop On Pretty Girls. However, that didn’t stop a new generation from discovering them via the film "O Brother Where Art Thou?", which included their version of "I'll Fly Away".
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.