Edward John Renehan Jr. (born c 1956) [1] is an American writer, consultant, publisher, and Grammy Award-winning musician.
Edward John Renehan Jr. (born c 1956) [1] is an American writer, consultant, publisher, and Grammy Award-winning musician.
Renehan grew up in the Long Island village of Valley Stream, New York, where he attended school with future actor/director Steve Buscemi, and at age 13 began learning the guitar. He studied blues guitar with the Reverend Gary Davis in New York as a teenager. By 20, he was playing and recording with folksingers Pete Seeger and Don McLean, among others. In 1976, he and Seeger recorded "Fifty Sail on Newburgh Bay: Hudson Valley Songs Old & New Sung by Pete Seeger and Ed Renehan." [2] Several of the tracks Renehan recorded with Seeger reappeared in 2019 as part of the six-CD, table-top book retrospective "Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection" [3] which won the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album. [4]
In his early twenties he performed with Happy Traum, Artie Traum and others at various venues and folk festivals in the North East. Renehan stopped playing professionally in 1980, and only rarely ventured onto stages thereafter. [5]
Renehan graduated from State University of New York at New Paltz. [1] He thereafter worked for several New York publishing companies, focusing on the developing domain of digital publishing, including e-publishing and print-on-demand (POD) technologies. His tenure included 7 years as Director of Computer Publishing Programs for MBCI/Macmillan, now a part of Bookspan. [6]
From 1994, he worked as an independent consultant and author, including writing books on the Kennedys, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Burroughs, as well as best-selling books about computers and computing. [1] During this period he wrote books published by Doubleday, Crown, Oxford University Press, Basic Books, McGraw Hill, Simon & Schuster, Chelsea House, and other firms. Renehan also offers ghost-writing services. [7]
In 2010 Renehan founded New Street Communications, an enterprise focused on audio, digital, and POD editions of books in a range of fields. The firm includes two subsidiaries: Dark Hall Press (which publishes original horror and science fiction titles), [8] and New Street Nautical Audio, which publishes sailing related audiobooks. [9] According to a July 2013 report in the Providence Business News, the combined New Street firms had revenues of more than $200,000 in the 2012 fiscal year, which was the enterprise's second full year of operation. [10] As of June 2015, the firm had 85 titles in print. [11]
Renehan is married and lives in the village of Wickford, Rhode Island. [1] [12] He is the father of two grown children, and a grandfather. He has served on several nonprofit boards, including the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. [1] He is active in the Electronic Frontier Foundation — the co-founder of which, John Perry Barlow, sat on the New Street Editorial Board until his death in 2018. [13] With Stewart Brand and others, he is a founding member of The Long Now Foundation. [14] He is an avid sailor. [1] He is the grandson of Edward Joseph Renehan Sr..
Huddie William Ledbetter, better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk and blues singer notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "In the Pines", "Goodnight, Irene", "Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil".
Peter Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.
The Weavers were an American folk music quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City originally consisting of Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman. Founded in 1948, the group sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, gospel music, children's songs, labor songs, and American ballads. The group sold millions of records at the height of their popularity, including the first folk song to reach No. 1 on popular music charts, their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene." Despite their popularity, the Weavers were blacklisted during much of the 1950s.
Anthology of American Folk Music is a three-album compilation, released in 1952 by Folkways Records, of eighty-four recordings of American folk, blues and country music made and issued from 1926 to 1933 by a variety of performers. The album was compiled from experimental film maker Harry Smith's own personal collection of 78 rpm records.
John Burroughs was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the conservation movement in the United States. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871.
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters.
Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, 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.
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.
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an 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."
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.
Happy Traum is an American folk musician who started playing music in the 1950s and became a stalwart of the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960s and the Woodstock music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. For several years, he studied blues guitar with Brownie McGhee, who was a big influence on his guitar style. Happy is most famously known as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, a duo he began with his brother. They released several albums, including Happy and Artie Traum, Double Back, and Hard Times In The Country. He has continued as a solo artist and as founder of Homespun Music Instruction.
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music.
Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion were a musical duo. Guthrie and Irion were married on October 16, 1999, and began performing together as an acoustic duo in late 2000. Their music combined Irion's love of rock and blues with Guthrie's roots of folk and country.
"Worried Man Blues" is a folk song in the roots music repertoire. It is catalogued as Roud Folk Song Index No. 4753. Like many folk songs passed by oral tradition, the lyrics vary from version to version, but generally all contain the chorus "It takes a worried man to sing a worried song/It takes a worried man to sing a worried song/I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long." The verses tell the story of a man imprisoned for unknown reasons "I went across the river, and I lay down to sleep/When I woke up, had shackles on my feet", who pines for his lost love, who is "on the train and gone." The melody in 4/4 timing has a strong resemblance to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", which is in 6/8 timing.
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.
Moses Asch was an American recording engineer and record executive. He founded Asch Records, which then changed its name to Folkways Records when the label transitioned from 78 RPM recordings to LP records. Asch ran the Folkways label from 1948 until his death in 1986. Folkways was very influential in bringing folk music into the American cultural mainstream. Some of America's greatest folk songs were originally recorded for Asch, including "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie and "Goodnight Irene" by Lead Belly. Asch sold many commercial recordings to Verve Records; after his death, Asch's archive of ethnic recordings was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and released as Smithsonian Folkways Records.
The discography of Pete Seeger, an American folk singer, consists of 52 studio albums, 23 compilation albums, 22 live albums, and 31 singles. Seeger's musical career started in 1940 when he joined The Almanac Singers. He stayed with the group for two years until he was drafted into the Army to fight in the Second World War. After the end of World War II in 1945, Seeger helped found an organization known as People's Songs, along with the influential folk music magazine People's Songs Bulletin. He published several singles and a studio album with the magazine. Seeger would play at People's Songs events, called hootenannies, until the organization folded in 1949. After People's Songs, Seeger and another former member of the Almanacs, Lee Hays, founded the Weavers, who achieved commercial success. In 1952, The Weavers went on hiatus due to the Red Scare; Seeger and Hays both had Communist ties. After the demise of the Weavers, Seeger released a solo album, American Folk Songs for Children, in 1953 on Folkways Records. He continued to release albums on Folkways until he signed with Capitol in 1961.
Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick (1933–1986) was an African-American musician, civil rights activist, and minister from Haynesville, Louisiana. In late 1964 he was a co-founder of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed black self-defense group, in the small industrial mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect the black community against white violence. Together with Earnest "Chilly Willy" Thomas, Kirkpatrick also founded Deacons chapters in other cities of Louisiana, and in Mississippi and Alabama.
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.
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