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.
Ella Jenkins is an American folk singer and actress. Dubbed "The First Lady of the Children's Folk Song" by the Wisconsin State Journal, she has been a leading performer of children's music for over fifty years. Her album, Multicultural Children's Songs (1995), has long been the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release. She has appeared on numerous children's television programs and in 2004, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk was an American folk singer. An important figure in the American folk music revival and New York City's Greenwich Village scene in the 1960s, he was nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street".
Jean Ruth Ritchie was an American folk singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player, called by some the "Mother of Folk". In her youth she learned hundreds of folk songs in the traditional way, many of which were Appalachian variants of centuries old British and Irish songs, including dozens of Child Ballads. In adulthood, she shared these songs with wide audiences, as well as writing some of her own songs using traditional foundations.
John Cohen was an American musician, photographer and film maker who performed and documented the traditional music of the rural South and played a major role in the American folk music revival. In the 1950s and 60s, Cohen was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a New York–based string band. Cohen made several expeditions to Peru to film and record the traditional culture of the Q'ero, an indigenous people. Cohen was also a professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College for 25 years.
Bascom Lamar Lunsford was a folklorist, performer of traditional Appalachian music, and lawyer from western North Carolina. He was often known by the nickname "Minstrel of the Appalachians."
"There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" is a children's rhyme and nonsense song of a kind known as cumulative.
Jay Presson Allen was an American screenwriter, playwright, stage director, television producer, and novelist. Known for her withering wit and sometimes-off-color wisecracks, she was one of the few women making a living as a screenwriter at a time when women were a rarity in the profession. "You write to please yourself," she said, "The only office where there's no superior is the office of the scribe."
Alice Gerrard is an American bluegrass singer, banjoist, fiddler, and guitar player. She performed as part of a duo with Hazel Dickens, and as part of The Strange Creek Singers and The Back Creek Buddies.
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.
Elizabeth Ardis Mitchell is an American singer, songwriter and musician. She began her career performing with Lisa Loeb as the duo Liz and Lisa, then founded the indie rock band Ida in 1991, of which she continues to be a member. As a solo artist, she has been recording and performing music for children since 1998.
Fast Folk Musical Magazine was a combination magazine and record album published from February 1982 to 1997. The magazine acted as a songwriter/performer cooperative, and was an outlet for singer-songwriters to release their first recordings.
Fay Kanin was an American screenwriter, playwright and producer. Kanin was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1979 to 1983.
Mark Dawidziak is an American author and critic.
Suni Paz is an Argentinian singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet, folklorist, translator, and teacher, who has recorded and has been published extensively. Paz is part of the progressive Latin American music movement known as nueva canción.
Helen LaFrance was a self-taught Black American artist born in Graves County, Kentucky, the second of four daughters to James Franklin Orr and Lillie May Ligon Orr. Though the terms are confining, Helen was often described as both an outsider artist due to her lack of formal training and existence outside the cultural mainstream and as a memory painter, best known for her captures of the disappearing lifestyle of the rural South. She also painted powerful and intensely spiritual visionary interpretations of the Bible, in a style that differed radically from her memory paintings. Sharing traits in common with memory painters Horace Pippin (1888-1946) and Grandma Moses (1860-1961), LaFrance has been referred to as "the Black Grandma Moses."
Jeff Place is the Grammy Award-winning 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.
Anne Grimes was an American journalist, musician and historian of American folklore. An Ohio folksinger, she collected and performed traditional songs now preserved in the Anne Grimes Collection in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. She also collected vintage dulcimers and other instruments now housed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., in 1997. Grimes was a classically trained vocalist and accomplished pianist among other musical pursuits.
"Helen Morgan" was an American television play broadcast on May 16, 1957, as part of the CBS television series, Playhouse 90. It was the 33rd episode of the first season of Playhouse 90.
