Louisa Jo Killen
One of the great voices of the British folk revival began living as a woman at 76 – and regretted nothing.
Louisa Jo Killen grew up in Gateshead on the Tyne in a family where people sang at home: hymns, ballads, music hall songs. In 1958 she co-founded one of the first folk clubs in Britain in Newcastle, and from 1961 she sang professionally, then under the name Louis Killen.
She became the defining interpreter of 19th-century songs of miners, sailors and factory workers, and her recordings of songs such as “The Shoals of Herring” are still considered definitive. She was also a pioneer of the English concertina as an accompanying instrument. In 1967 she moved to the United States, worked with Pete Seeger and from 1971 sang with the Clancy Brothers. Later she worked at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, singing sea shanties. More than sixty albums bear her name.
In 2010, aged 76, she surprised audiences and friends: from then on she performed in women’s clothes and called herself Louisa Jo. In 2012 she underwent gender-affirming surgery. By all accounts, her friends and most of her fans stood by her. She said she regretted nothing – neither her long life as a man nor her short one as a woman.
A few years before her death she returned to her hometown. Louisa Jo Killen died of cancer in Gateshead in 2013, aged 79.