Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
The Civil War is a 1990 American television documentary miniseries created by Ken Burns about the American Civil War. It was the first broadcast to air on PBS for five consecutive nights, from September 23 to 27, 1990.
"Ashokan Farewell" is a piece of music composed by the American folk musician Jay Ungar in 1982. For many years, it served as a goodnight or farewell waltz at the annual Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps, run by Ungar and his wife Molly Mason, who gave the tune its name, at the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY New Paltz in Upstate New York.
Short Trip Home is an album of classical chamber music by a quartet unusual both for its membership and its instrumentation. Double bassist Edgar Meyer wrote the majority of the compositions recorded on the album for a quartet of violin, double bass, mandolin, and guitar. Classical violinist Joshua Bell joins bluegrass musicians Sam Bush and Mike Marshall and Meyer on the album. In addition to classical music in an American vernacular, the quartet occasionally breaks out on more traditional instrumental bluegrass tunes.
Jay Ungar is an American folk musician and composer.
Neal Hellman is an American folk musician, music teacher, and performer of the mountain dulcimer. He has been active in performing, writing, teaching and recording acoustic music for the past thirty years throughout the United States and Europe.
The Mammals are a contemporary folk rock band based in the Hudson Valley area of New York, in the United States.
Down from the Mountain is a 2000 documentary and concert film featuring a live performance by country and traditional music artists who participated in the Grammy-winning soundtrack recording for the Joel and Ethan Coen film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The concert, held at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee on May 24, 2000, was a benefit for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The documentary was directed by Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker. The artists in the concert also participated in a Down from the Mountain concert tour.
The 2nd South Carolina String Band is a band of Civil War re-enactors who recreate American popular music of the 1820s to 1860s with authentic instruments and in period style. The group claims to "perform Civil War music as authentically as possible. .. as it truly sounded to the soldiers of the Civil War."
"Lorena" is an American antebellum song with Ohio origins. The lyrics were written in 1856 by Rev. Henry D. L. Webster, after a broken engagement. He wrote a long poem about his fiancée Ella Blocksom, but changed her name at first to "Bertha" and later to "Lorena", perhaps an adaptation of "Lenore" from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven." Henry Webster's friend Joseph Philbrick Webster wrote the music, and the song was first published in Chicago in 1857. It became a favorite of soldiers of both sides during the American Civil War. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
Matt Glaser is an American jazz and bluegrass violinist. He served as the chair of the string department at the Berklee College of Music for more than twenty-five years. He is now the founder and artistic director of Berklee's American Roots Music Program.
The Bakersfield sound is a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid-to-late 1950s in and around Bakersfield, California. Bakersfield is defined by its influences of rock and roll and honky-tonk style country, and its heavy use of electric instrumentation and backbeats. It was also a reaction against the slickly produced, orchestra-laden Nashville sound, which was becoming popular in the late 1950s. The Bakersfield sound became one of the most popular and influential country genres of the 1960s, initiating a revival of honky-tonk music and influencing later country rock and outlaw country musicians, as well as progressive country.
Michael J. Merenda Jr. is a singer-songwriter with the American folk band, the Mammals. He plays guitar, banjo, ukulele and percussion. He also has a solo career and performs with the Jay Ungar and Molly Mason Family Band.
Ruth Ungar Merenda was born February 19, 1976, in Mount Kisco, New York. She is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who plays fiddle, ukulele and guitar. She is the daughter of fiddler/composer Jay Ungar and singer Lyn Hardy and a graduate of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Doug Wamble is an American jazz guitarist and vocalist from Tennessee.
The Ashokan Center (formerly the Ashokan Field Campus, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Ashokan Field Campus Historic District, is a 385 acre outdoor education, conference, and retreat center located in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Schools have explored and been inspired by Ashokan's forests, waterfalls, stream-fed ponds, and open meadows since 1967. Music camps, blacksmithing conferences, and retreat groups have called Ashokan home while schools are not in residence. The name Ashokan means "place of many fishes," or "where rushing waters meet" in the Lenape language.
Songs of the Civil War is a compilation album, released in 1991 by Columbia, that presents an assortment of contemporary performers recording period pieces and traditional songs, most of which date back to the American Civil War.
Transatlantic Sessions is the collective title for a series of musical productions by Glasgow-based Pelicula Films Ltd, funded by- and produced for BBC Scotland, BBC Four and RTÉ of Ireland. The productions comprise collaborative live performances by various leading folk, bluegrass and country musicians from both sides of the North Atlantic, playing music from Scotland, Ireland, England and North America, who congregate under the musical direction of Aly Bain and Jerry Douglas to record and film a set of half-hour TV episodes. The Television director is Mike Alexander and the producer is Douglas Eadie.
Bruce Eli Sagan is an American Professor of Mathematics at Michigan State University. He specializes in enumerative, algebraic, and topological combinatorics. He is also known as a musician, playing music from Scandinavia and the Balkans.
The Vietnam War is a 10-part American television documentary series about the Vietnam War written by Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The first episode premiered on PBS on September 17, 2017. The script is by Geoffrey Ward, and the series is narrated by Peter Coyote. This series is one of the few PBS series to carry a TV-MA rating.
