Folk Singer. She was an early pioneer of the "Hootenanny movement", which sought to bring folk music to a larger audience. Raised in South Carolina by a musical family, she was taught about folk at an early age by her parents' friends, poet Carl Sandburg and singer Leadbelly; later she learned the Irish variety from the Abbey Theatre Company of Dublin during their American tours. Reed taught herself to play the Irish harp and the zither, becoming well-accomplished on both by the time her family moved to New York when she was a teenager; she spent the war years entertaining wounded troops with renditions of what would become her signature pieces, "Danny Boy", "He Moved Through the Fair", and "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair". She made her Town Hall debut in 1946, played Broadway in "Billy the Kid", toured with "Finian's Rainbow" and "Brigadoon", and became a regular on the radio, later moving to television on "The Firestone Hour" and similar programs. Reed was seen frequently at New York's Carnegie Hall and Los Angeles' Wilshire Ebell Theatre; she made but one Hollywood feature, starring in the 1948 "Glamour Girl" with Gene Krupa. Despite several bestselling albums, her career was somewhat hampered by a perception that she was "too pop for folk and too folk for pop". Reed was the subject of a "Life" magazine cover story on folk music in 1955, but was essentially finished in the music business after she was, along with some other folk singers, blacklisted for her leftist political views. Largely withdrawing from public view, she was said to have kept her voice, performing in local venues into her 80s. Her only marriage, to actor James Karen, was dissolved. She spent her final years in Nyack, New York, running a handicraft shop, and died in a nursing facility; at her death, a significant portion of her recorded legacy was available on CD.