Louis Killen

A mainstay of British folk music since the '50s best known for his collections of sea shanties and whaling songs, Louis Killen was a singer, archivist, lecturer, and historian on the level of Ewan MacColl, Pete Seeger, and A.L. Lloyd, all of whom Killen worked with at one time or another. In 2010, at the age of 76, Killen began living and performing as a woman, and underwent a sex-change operation in 2012. Now known as Louisa Jo Killen, she lived only a brief time longer, dying of cancer at her home in Gateshead, England in August 2013 at the age of 79. Born in the northern v...