- Melvin Wine
Melvin Wine (1909-2003) was an American old-time fiddler from the state of West Virginia. He lived in Copen, in Braxton County, West Virginia. Wine was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts's National Heritage Fellowship (the U.S.'s highest award presented to traditional musicians and artists). - Mick Moloney
Mick Moloney is a traditional Irish musician and scholar. Born in County Limerick, he was an important figure on the Dublin folk-song revival in the 1960s. In 1973, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He gained early fame as a member of Irish group The Johnstons and The Emmet Spiceland but has since performed and recorded with a variety of groups and individuals, including Eugene O'Donnell and Séamus Egan, … - B. B. King
Riley B. King, better known as B. B. King or "The King of Blues" (born September 16 1925 in Itta Bena, Mississippi), is an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter, widely considered one of the best and most respected blues musicians of all time. He was also ranked 3<sup>rd</sup> on the Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. - Michael Flatley
Michael Ryan Flatley (born July 16, 1958 in Detroit, Michigan) is an Irish-American step dancer from the south side of Chicago. His parents were from County Mayo and County Carlow. As a child, he moved to Chicago - the city which he considers his home town. He began dancing lessons at 11 and, in 1975, became the first non-European to win the All-Ireland World Championship for Irish dance. As a trained boxer he won the Golden Gloves Championship in 1975. - Bill Monroe
William Smith Monroe developed the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader. He is often referred to as "the father of bluegrass." Monroe was born in Rosine, Kentucky. His father, James Buchanan Monroe, was a well-to-do farmer while his mother, Melissa Ann Van Diver, … - Boozoo Chavis
Boozoo Chavis (born 23 October 1930 in Lake Charles, LA and died 5 May 2001 in Austin, Texas) was a zydeco musician - music created by French speaking Creoles of South-West Louisiana. He was active from 1954 until his death during which time he largely sang and played the accordion. Mr Boozoo was also a prolific writer of zydeco songs. Many of his songs have become standards of the zydeco repertoire, … - John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1917 - June 21, 2001) was an influential American post-war blues singer, guitarist, and songwriter born in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi. From a musical family, he was a cousin of Earl Hooker. John was also influenced by his stepfather, a local blues guitarist, who learned in Shreveport, Louisiana to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time. - Kevin Burke
Open House is an acoustic world music phenomenon. Drawing strength from the diversity of its musicians, the group takes full advantage of its varied instrumentation, deftly genre-jumping through an assortment of Celtic, American traditional and eastern European settings. Legendary Irish fiddler Kevin Burke slips easily amongst jigs, reels... more - Clifton Chenier
Clifton Chenier (June 25, 1925 - December 12, 1987) a Creole French speaking native of Opelousas, Louisiana, was an eminent performer of Zydeco music, a blend of Cajun and Creole music with R&B, jazz, and blues influences. He played the accordion. Chenier's career began in 1954, when he signed with Elko Records and released "Clifton's Blues", a regional hit. His first hit was soon followed by "Ay 'Tite Fille (Hey, Little Girl)" (cover of Professor Longhair), … - Esther Martinez
Esther Martinez (1912 - September 16, 2006) was a linguist and storyteller for the Tewa people of the U.S. states of Arizona and New Mexico. Martinez was given the American Indian name P'oe Tswa (meaning Blue Water) and was also known by various affctionate nicknames, including "Ko'oe Esther" and "Aunt Esther". Martinez was raised, mostly by her grandparents, in northern New Mexico. - Doc Watson
Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson, born March 3, 1923 in Deep Gap, North Carolina, is a guitar player, songwriter and singer of bluegrass, folk, country, blues and gospel music. According to Doc on his three CD biographical recording "Legacy", he got the nickname "Doc" during a live radio broadcast when the announcer remarked that his given name Arthel was odd and he needed an easy nickname to go by. - Shirley Caesar
Shirley Caesar (b. October 13, 1938) is an twelve time African-American Grammy winning gospel singer and Christian pastor. Caesar was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. She faced many obstacles in her youth, including racism, segregation, the death of her father when she was only eight years old, and the responsibility of caring for a semi-invalid mother. Caesar began singing as a young girl in church. Although she was struggling in school, she remained determined, … - Pinetop Perkins
Pinetop Perkins (born Joe Willie Perkins on July 7, 1913) is an American blues musician. Perkins was born in Belzoni, Mississippi. He began his career as a guitarist, but then injured the tendons in his left arm in a fight with a choirgirl in Helena, Arkansas. Unable to play guitar, Perkins switched to the piano, and also switched from Robert Nighthawk's KFFA radio program to Sonny Boy Williamson's "King Biscuit Time". - Ralph Stanley
Ralph Stanley (born February 25, 1927) is an American bluegrass musician. Stanley was born in Big Spraddle Creek, Virginia, near Stratton, Dickenson County, Virginia, USA. The son of Lucy and Lee Stanley, Ralph Edmond Stanley grew up in rural southwestern Virginia. Stanley learned to play the banjo, claw-hammer, style from his mother. It was her inspiration, coupled with Stanley's natural ability, which led Ralph and his older guitar-playing brother Carter, … - Sunnyland Slim
Albert "Sunnyland Slim" Luandrew, was a blues pianist born on a farm near Vance, Mississippi. He moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1925, where he performed with many of the popular blues musicians of the day. In 1942 he followed the great migration of southern workers to the industrial north in Chicago. At that time the electric blues was taking shape there, and through the years Sunnyland Slim played with such musicians as Muddy Waters, Robert Jr. Lockwood, and Little Walter. - Etta Baker
Etta Baker (born Etta Lucille Reid in Caldwell County, North Carolina, March 31, 1913, died September 23, 2006 in Fairfax, Virginia) was a Piedmont blues guitarist and singer from North Carolina, United States. - Zakir Hussain
Ustad Zakir Hussain, born March 9, 1951, son of tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha, is a well known classical tabla player in India. He has also won awards and recognitions for his contribution to the world of music. - David Honeyboy Edwards
David "Honeyboy" Edwards (born June 28, 1915 in Shaw, Mississippi, United States) is a Delta blues guitarist and singer. Friend to legendary musician Robert Johnson, Edwards was present on the fateful night Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that took his life. Folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Edwards in 1942. Edwards is still touring the country performing and is the author of one book, "The World Don't Owe Me Nothin'," published in 1997 by Chicago Review Press. - Margaret Tafoya
Margaret Tafoya was the matriarch of Santa Clara Pueblo potters. Margaret learned the art of making pottery from her parents Sara Fina Guiterrez Tafoya (1863-1949) and Jose Geronimo Tafoya (1863-1955). Sara Fina was considered the leading potter of Santa Clara in her day, as the master of making exceptionally large, finely polished blackware. She also occasionally made redware, micaceous clay storage jars and other smaller utilitarian forms. - Maude Kegg
- Charles Brown
Charles Brown (September 13, 1920 - January 21, 1999), born in Texas City, Texas was an American blues singer and pianist whose soft-toned, slow-paced blues-club style influenced the development of blues performance during the 1940s and 1950s. He had several hit recordings, including "Drifting Blues" and "Merry Christmas Baby". In the late 1940s a rising demand for blues was driven by an increasing white teenage audience in the South which quickly spread north and west. - Dewey Balfa
Dewey Balfa was a Cajun fiddler who contributed significantly to the popularity of Cajun music. Balfa was born in Mamou, Louisiana. He is perhaps best known for his 1964 performance at the Newport Folk Festival with Dewey Balfa, Gladius Thibodeaux and Vinus LeJeune, where the group received an enthusiastic response from over seventeen thousand audience members. After this, in 1965, he formed The Balfa Brothers. - Wanda Jackson
Wanda Jackson (born Wanda Jean Jackson October 20, 1937, in Maud, Oklahoma) is sometimes called the first female Rock and Roll singer. She began recording (on the Decca label) in 1954. Jackson signed with Capitol in 1956. In 1960 she saw pop chart success when Capitol rereleased her 1958 rendition of "Let's Have a Party." She switched over to Country Music in the 1960s, racking up a few hits there as well. - Simon Shaheen
Simon Shaheen is an Arab Israeli (Palestinian) oud and violin virtuoso and composer. At the age of 2, Shaheen moved with his family to Haifa. - Othar Turner
Othar Turner (a.k.a. Otha Turner) (b. east of Canton, Mississippi, June 2, 1907; d. February 26, 2003), was one of the last well-known fife players in the vanishing American fife and drum musical tradition. He lived his entire life in northern Mississippi as a farmer, where in 1923 at the age of 16 he first learned to play the fife and make them from sugarcane. - Pops Staples
Roebuck "Pops" Staples (December 28, 1914 - December 19, 2000) was a Mississippi-born gospel and R&B musician. He was the patriarch and member of singing group The Staple Singers, which included his son Pervis and daughters Mavis Staples, Yvonne, and Cleotha. He was an accomplished songwriter, guitarist and singer. He was nominated for a Grammy Award multiple times, and in 1995 won the Best Contemporary Blues Album. - Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie (born December 8, 1922) is an American folk singer and Appalachian dulcimer player. - Edwin Duhon
Edwin Duhon (11 June 1910 - 26 February 2006) was an American musician and co-founder of the Hackberry Ramblers, a band playing a combination of Cajun music, Western swing, and country music. Duhon formed the Hackberry Ramblers along with fiddler Luderin Darbone in 1933. He first played acoustic guitar and went on to play electric guitar, piano, double bass, harmonica, and accordion at various times. He focused solely on the accordion from the mid-1990s. - Obo Addy
Obo Addy (b. 1936) is an Ghanaian drummer and dancer who was one of the first native African musicians to bring the fusion of traditional folk music and Western pop music known as "worldbeat" to Europe and then to the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the late 1970s. He currently teaches music at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. - Francisco Aguabella
Francisco Aguabella (c. 1925) is an Afro-Cuban jazz conga player, well-known on the jazz scene since the 1950s born in Matanzas, Cuba. In 1992 he won a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Los Angeles, California where he teaches Afro-Cuban drumming to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles. - Mavis Staples
Mavis Staples (born July 10, 1939 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American rhythm and blues singer. - Tommy Jarrell
Tommy Jarrell (born Thomas Jefferson Jarrell, Surry County, North Carolina, March 1, 1901, United States; d. January 28, 1985, United States) was an American fiddler, banjo player, and singer from the Mount Airy region of North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains. Although he made his living from road construction (operating a motor grader for the North Carolina Highway Department until his retirement in 1966), Jarrell was an influential musician, … - Hazel Dickens
Hazel Dickens (born June 1, 1935, Mercer County, West Virginia) is an American bluegrass singer. She was the eighth child of an eleven-child mining family in West Virginia. Her music is characterized by not only her "high lonesome" singing style, but also by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs. Poverty drove the Dickens to move to the Baltimore, Maryland area when Dickens was nineteen. - Henry Townsend
Henry 'Mule' Townsend (born October 27, 1909 in Shelby, Mississippi, died September 25, 2006 in Mequon, Wisconsin) was an American blues singer, guitarist and pianist. He grew up in Cairo, Illinois and later moved to St. Louis, Missouri where he started recording with some of the early blues pioneers. He first recorded in 1929 and remained active as of 2006. He was also one of the only artists known to have recorded in every decade for the last 80 years. - Jerry Douglas
Jerry Douglas is an American Dobro player. He is often referred to as "flux" by his peers, a nickname given to him as a result of his ability to play at amazing speeds with the slide. In addition to his eleven solo releases and countless special projects, Douglas' stellar fretwork has graced over 1000 albums encompassing a dizzying range of musical styles. As a sideman, he's recorded with artists as diverse as Ray Charles, Peter Rowan, Béla Fleck, … - T. Viswanathan
Tanjore Viswanathan (b. Madras, India, August 13, 1927; d. Hartford, Connecticut, United States, September 10, 2002) was a Carnatic musician specializing in the Carnatic flute and voice. His brother was the "mridangam" player T. Ranganathan (1925-1987). He first came to the United States in 1958 on a Fulbright fellowship, studying ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1958 to 1960, and later teaching there. - Frankie Manning
Frankie Manning or Frankie "Musclehead" Manning, born Frank Manning in Jacksonville, Florida, on May 26, 1914, is an American dancer, instructor and choreographer. Manning is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Lindy Hop. He frequented Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s, eventually becoming a dancer in the elite and prestigious "Kat's Korner", … - Elizabeth Cotten
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten (January 5, 1895 - June 29, 1987) was an American musician. Her style was traditional blues and folk, but was original since she was self-taught, and had no knowledge of traditional guitar tunings (eg. standard 'EADGBE' tuning or any standard, established open tunings). Cotten was born in Carrboro, North Carolina to a musical family; her parents were George Nevills and Louise Price Nevills. Elizabeth was the youngest of five children. - Nimrod Workman
Nimrod Workman (November 5, 1895 - November 26, 1994) was an American singer, coal miner and union activist. His musical repertoire included traditional English and Scottish ballads, Appalachian folk songs and original compositions. - Wilho Saari
Wilho Saari is a fifth-generation Finnish-American player of the kantele, the Finnish psaltery. Kreeta Haapasalo, a well-known kantele player in Finland in the 1800s, was his great-great grandmother. Wilho's father, Wilho Sr., also performed the kantele in public, only in Washington, having brought a kantele with him to America in 1915.
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