An appreication: Ruth Grierson, naturalist, teacher, author, fiddler

She channeled every element of what made humans special, with her curiosity, thirst for learning, love for nature and music and indefatigable fearlessness

SOUTHWEST HARBOR, April 28, 2025 - Ruth Grierson has died. She was 97.

It would be easy to fill in the obligatory obituary profile - that she was an author, a newspaper columnist for 40 years and a renowned fiddler.

But that would not come close in describing this woman who had a profound influence on anyone around MDI who spent more than 5 minutes chatting with her.

My first conversation with her was probably 9 to 10 years ago, when she told me about a trip to Newfoundland with her daughter. At a music jam dominated by local musicians, she asked to join in, she said. She won over the local skeptics and was dubbed the “Ancient Fiddler.”

A few years later that became the moniker for her own Instagram post, a platform which suited her explorative nature at Age 90.

I read every one of her weekly columns in the Islander. She taught this city boy to pay attention to everything around me that moved and grew. About 10 years ago I started to learn the identity of birds, flowers, plants and animals. Maine was a great classroom and she was the unwitting mentor.

She taught me how to comport myself in the outdoors and to resist my temptation to interfere with nature’s own roadmap.

On June 28, 2024, she wrote:

“With the impulse to pick up any little baby whether bird, fawn or baby seals — please leave it where it is. A mother has placed its young there to learn to survive or to be fed. You may not see a parent around, but they are there somewhere.”

The Bangor Daily News wrote this profile eight years ago about a character who at Age 89 was just beginning to discover life.

Back then, some of us jammed at Sips Restaurant, which was a regular hangout for musicians. Brian Kupiec was the host.

“You’re never too old to learn new things. I’m getting to learn some blues,” She told the BDN. “Brian [Kupiec] is my guru when it comes to rock n’ roll. It’s not really my favorite, but then he gets me playing,” said Grierson. “I’m a pretty open minded person.”

Kupiec first met Ruth at the Common Good Soup Kitchen at its original Seawall location about a dozen years ago.

“In the ensuing years, I visited her house several times to work up material and rehearse. Ruth and I and David Dawson (another intrepid musical barnstormer) regularly performed a ‘pre-show’ at the Common Good on Sundays… a sort of ‘opening act’ for the Uke Mob (aka, The Common Good Band). She always had that little dog with her, often resting in her violin case.

“Ruth was fearless and was always willing to delve into music that was out of her zone. As is common in jam situations, especially in the blues genre, each musician would ad lib a solo during a song. Ruth had never done this before, and she loved it. She sparked right up whenever I said, ‘Take it, Ruth’. ”

Once when a local news service arrived to do a piece on the soup kitchen, “Ruth and I broke into ‘Hand Me Down My Walking Cane,’ which starts with the lyric, ‘I got drunk, and I got in jail…’ Ruth smiled and leaned into that fiddle. Sweet times.”

Nine years ago, Ruth underwent open heart surgery. Her case was documented by Northern Light Healthcare in this video.

Ruth said she was in the hospital for two or three days. “Thirteen days later, I was playing up here at the restaurant.”

Her doctor, Matthew McKay, said, “Ruth was somebody that despite being 88 years old was very engaged in her community. She's otherwise pretty healthy. She had plans for a lot more living, and this single but severe problem was holding her back.”

She wrote her newspaper column first for the Bar Harbor Times, and then the Islander. She also published five books about natural history including “Living on the Edge” about tide pools and life along the seaside which she co-authored with Thomas F. Vining. (Vining is best known for his exhaustive compendium of graves on MDI: Cemeteries of Cranberry Isles and the towns of Mount Desert Island: A record of names and dates on gravestones in cemeteries of Bar Harbor, Cranberry Isles, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, and Tremont)

She also began a collaboration with Vining on her column.

The BDN wrote that after graduating in 1949, Ruth taught music in schools in upstate New York, and married Stanley O. Grierson, a fellow naturalist, photographer and taxidermist, who passed away in 1992.

“I’d have gone to college to be a naturalist, but back then, women didn’t go to school for that sort of thing. That was a man’s field. Women were secretaries, they were nurses, or they were teachers. Maybe a waitress. Those were your options. You couldn’t do anything else,” she told the BDN. “So I went to teacher’s college.”

Grierson moved to Maine with her two children and husband in 1972. She created a trio and taught piano and violin and began to play publicly at open mics and gigs all over the island.

Her frequent accompanist the last decade was Debbie Krysak.

They gave this online performance on April 17, 2019 at WERU.

The BDN wrote that Ruth was initially circumspect about taking on new genres such Appalachian mountain music.

“I was always afraid to try at first, because I was afraid I’d make a mistake,” said Grierson. “But Ashley Bryan, the great artist out on Islesford, told me, ‘If you make a mistake, just turn it into something positive.’ I do that with music. He does it with art.”

(Bryan died in 2022 at the age of 98. One of my first articles for this journal was about Bryan’s friendship with artist Henry Isaacs.)

On Sept. 1, 2018, when she was only 90, I spotted Ruth playing with Debbie Krysak and Mandolinist Jim Vikasi at the Common Good.

I asked if I could join in.

She said, “Sure, what do you want to play?”

I asked her if she knew the elegiac “Ashokan Farewell.” It was like asking a priest if he knew the Lord’s Prayer.

“Ruth was an inspiration to us all,” Debbie Krysak said.

Ruth began to slow down about a year ago. But three weeks ago, she picked up the violin and played a few songs as well as continuing to play the piano, Debbie said.

On April 14, Ruth Grierson penned her last column with her lone byline.

This was the closing paragraph:

“Plants also tell us of a changing season. Some lawns and fields are beginning to take on a green color. Expanding buds of common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) also remind us that daylight is increasing in length and intensity and that temperatures are rising. In only 45 days or so, they will be in full flower, and some of you may follow an old tradition of preparing baskets of freshly cut lilacs to place at graves on Memorial Day.”

No doubt there will be many baskets with cut lilacs this Memorial Day as we remember Ruth Grierson.