Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. was an American folk musician and musicologist. He served as music director and song leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.
Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music. It developed along with various North American folk dances, such as square dancing, contra dance, clogging, and buck dancing. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle and plucked string instruments, most often the banjo, guitar, and mandolin. Together, they form an ensemble called the string band, which along with the simple banjo-fiddle duet have historically been the most common configurations to play old-time music. The genre is considered a precursor to modern country music.
Hazel Jane Dickens was an American bluegrass singer, songwriter, double bassist and guitarist. Her music was characterized not only by her high, lonesome singing style, but also by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs. Cultural blogger John Pietaro noted that "Dickens didn’t just sing the anthems of labor, she lived them and her place on many a picket line, staring down gunfire and goon squads, embedded her into the cause." The New York Times extolled her as "a clarion-voiced advocate for coal miners and working people and a pioneer among women in bluegrass music." With Alice Gerrard, Dickens was one of the first women to record a bluegrass album. She was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame alongside Gerrard in 2017.
The New Lost City Ramblers, or NLCR, was an American contemporary old-time string band that formed in New York City in 1958 during the folk revival. Mike Seeger, John Cohen and Tom Paley were its founding members. Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley, who left the group in 1962. Seeger died of cancer in 2009, Paley died in 2017, and Cohen died in 2019. NLCR participated in the old-time music revival, and directly influenced many later musicians.
Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who mainly played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings. He desired to make known the caretakers of culture that inspired and taught him. He was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an influential American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking". NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
Laurie Alexis Lewis is an American singer, musician, and songwriter in the genre of bluegrass music.
Wade Ward (1892–1971) was an American old-time music banjo player and fiddler from Independence, Virginia. He was widely known playing the clawhammer banjo and frequently won the Galax, Virginia Old Time Fiddler's Convention. His instrument, a Gibson RB-11 5-string banjo, is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Along with Kyle Creed, Wade Ward is known for his 'Galax' style of playing the clawhammer banjo.
Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a part of the Smithsonian's Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located at Capital Gallery in downtown Washington, D.C. The label was founded in 1987 after the family of Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, donated the entire Folkways Records label to the Smithsonian. The donation was made on the condition that the Institution continue Asch's policy that each of the more than 2,000 albums of Folkways Records remain in print forever, regardless of sales. Since then, the label has expanded on Asch's vision of documenting the sounds of the world, adding six other record labels to the collection, as well as releasing over 300 new recordings. Some well-known artists have contributed to the Smithsonian Folkways collection, including Pete Seeger, Ella Jenkins, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Famous songs include "This Land Is Your Land", "Goodnight, Irene", and "Midnight Special". Due to the unique nature of its recordings, which include an extensive collection of traditional American music, children's music, and international music, Smithsonian Folkways has become an important collection to the musical community, especially to ethnomusicologists, who utilize the recordings of "people's music" from all over the world.
Ralph Rinzler was an American mandolin player, folksinger, and the co-founder of the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall every summer in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a curator for American art, music, and folk culture at the Smithsonian. This festival was from the beginning and continues to be a major event for musicians, artistans, and craftsman from a broad variety of American culture, including African American, Native American, Appalachian, Southern, Western and other groups in the United States.
Dewey Balfa was an American Cajun fiddler and singer who contributed significantly to the popularity of Cajun music. Balfa was born near Mamou, Louisiana. He is perhaps best known for his 1964 performance at the Newport Folk Festival with Gladius Thibodeaux and Vinus LeJeune, where the group received an enthusiastic response from over seventeen thousand audience members. He sang the song "Parlez Nous à Boire" in the 1981 cult film Southern Comfort, in which he had a small role.
Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz are an American folk music duo known for performing traditional music from the early American canon of bluegrass, gospel, and old time music. The duo, however, on occasion does record original songs and music by contemporary songwriters. They live in the small village of Tanner, West Virginia. Tracy Schwarz was a member of the New Lost City Ramblers.
Ola Belle Reed was an American Appalachian folk singer, songwriter and banjo player.
"Cumberland Gap" is an Appalachian folk song that likely dates to the latter half of the 19th century and was first recorded in 1924. The song is typically played on banjo or fiddle, and well-known versions of the song include instrumental versions as well as versions with lyrics. A version of the song appeared in the 1934 book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, by folk song collector John Lomax. Woody Guthrie recorded a version of the song at his Folkways sessions in the mid-1940s, and the song saw a resurgence in popularity with the rise of bluegrass and the American folk music revival in the 1950s. In 1957, the British musician Lonnie Donegan had a No. 1 UK hit with a skiffle version of "Cumberland Gap".
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.
The Southern Folklife Collection is an archival resource at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, dedicated to collecting, preserving and disseminating traditional and vernacular music, art, and culture related to the American South. The Southern Folklife Collection is located in UNC's Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.
Bertie Caudill Dickens (1902–1994) was an old-time banjo player from the community of Ennice in Alleghany County, North Carolina. Dickens was born in Grayson County, Virginia, but lived most of her life in Ennice.
Dudley Dale Connell is an American singer in the bluegrass tradition. He is best known for his work with the Johnson Mountain Boys, Longview, and The Seldom Scene.
Jeff Place is the American writer and producer, and a curator and senior archivist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He has won three Grammy Awards and six Indie Awards.
