On July 10, 1885, Ruth Crawford Seeger was born in East Liverpool, Ohio — and went on to produce some of the most formally rigorous and genuinely strange music of the 20th century before being systematically written out of the American modernist canon.

Seeger was a prodigy who taught piano at eleven and had developed a distinctive compositional voice by her mid-twenties. Her String Quartet 1931 is now recognized as one of the foundational works of American musical modernism: it deploys a technique she helped invent called "dissonant counterpoint" and contains a third movement — a single line of music passed in extreme counterpoint across the four instruments — unlike anything written before it.

She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, the first woman to do so in musical composition. She used it to study in Berlin and Budapest. She returned, married musicologist Charles Seeger, and spent the next two decades collecting and transcribing American folk songs — the archive that would become the backbone of the folk revival and inform Pete Seeger, among others.

In those two decades, she wrote almost no new concert music. Raising four children and doing the "supportive" work left little time.

She died of cancer in 1953, at 52. Her String Quartet was rediscovered in the 1970s.