- Cisco Houston
Gilbert Vandine 'Cisco' Houston was an American folk singer who is closely associated with Woody Guthrie due to their extensive history of recording together. Houston was a regular recording artist for Moses Asch's Folkways recording studio. He also performed with such folk/blues musicians as Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, and the Almanac Singers. - David Hackett Fischer
David Hackett Fischer (b. December 2, 1935) is University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University. His major works have tackled everything from large macroeconomic and cultural trends ("Albion's Seed," "The Great Wave") to narrative histories of significant events ("Paul Revere's Ride," "Washington's Crossing") to explorations of historiography ("Historians' Fallacies"). - Ella Jenkins
Ella Jenkins Dubbed “The First Lady of the Children’s Folk Song” by the "Wisconsin State Journal", Ella Jenkins has been a leading performer of children’s music for fifty years.<sup>1</sup> <br><br> - Clarence Ashley
Clarence "Tom" Ashley (September 29 1895 (or 1885?) - June 2 1967) was a 20th-century American clawhammer banjo player and singer. Born in Bristol, Tennessee and nicknamed "Tommy Tiddy Waddy" by his grandfather, Ashley became best known to friends and acquaintances as 'Tom'. He began to play banjo and guitar at a young age, and at 16 joined a traveling medicine show as a banjo-picker and singer. Ashley made his first recordings with Garley Foster and Doc Walsh in 1928. - 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. - William Graham Sumner
William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), was an American academic and professor at Yale College. For many years he had a reputation as one of the most influential teachers there. He was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. His popular essays gave him a wide audience for his "laissez-faire": advocacy of free markets, anti-imperialism, and the gold standard. - David Holt
David Holt is a four-time Grammy Award winner for his work as a musician. He is dedicated to performing and preserving traditional American music and stories. Holt plays ten acoustic instruments and has released numerous recordings of traditional mountain music and southern folktales. He also hosts a jazz program for public radio, Riverwalk, as well as a television program on folk music and culture on North Carolina public television, Folkways. - Harold Courlander
Harold Courlander (September 18, 1908 - March 15, 1996), noted novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, was recognized as one of the world's leading experts in the study of Haitian life. The author of 35 books and plays and numerous scholarly articles, Courlander specialized in the study of African, Caribbean, Afro-American (U.S.), and American Indian cultures. He took a special interest in oral literature, cults, and Afro-American cultural connections with Africa. - Sammy Walker
Sammy Walker (born in 1952 near Atlanta, Georgia) is an American singer-songwriter. Influenced by the folk and country sounds of Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie and Hank Williams, Walker emerged in the mid 1970s with two albums for the Folkways label and two albums for Warner Brothers. While appearing on Bob Fass's radio show in 1975, he caught the ear of Phil Ochs, who was impressed by the young songwriter and agreed to produce his first album with Folkways. - Bill Spence
Bill Spence (born August 12, 1940 in Iowa City, Iowa) is a hammered dulcimer player from New York. Bill took up the hammered dulcimer after hearing Howie Mitchell play at the 1969 Fox Hollow Festival in Petersburgh, New York. He made his first dulcimer following a plan in Mitchell's book on building your own dulcimer. The only hammered dulcimer recordings available at the time were one by Mitchell, and another by Chet Parker on the Folkways label. - Gary Michael Green
Gary Michael Green was once known as one of America's most intense folk singers, civil rights and union organizers and advocate of Native American rights. His three record albums, recorded in the 1970s on New York’s legendary Folkways records became part of the Smithsonian’s collection in the 1980s. - Sidney Robertson Cowell
Sidney Robertson Cowell (born Sidney William Hawkins in San Francisco, California, United States, 1903; d. 1995) was an American ethnographer and the wife of the composer Henry Cowell. She collected a large volume of American folk songs between 1936 and 1957, particularly for the WPA Northern California Folk Music Project (1938-1940), which she initiated. In her later life, she lived in Shady, New York, United States. - Peter La Farge
Peter La Farge (April 30, 1931 - October 27, 1965) was a New York-based folksinger and songwriter of the 1950s and 1960s. He is best known for his affiliations with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. According to anecdotal sources, he was descended from the nearly extinct Narragansett Indian tribe and was raised by the Tewa people on the Hopi reservation near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was the biological son of the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Oliver La Farge. - Gus Cannon
Gus Cannon (b. Red Banks, Mississippi, September 12, 1883 - d. Memphis, October 15, 1979) was an African American blues musician who helped to popularize jug bands (such as his own Cannon's Jug Stompers) in the 1920s and 1930s. Born on a plantation, Cannon moved to Clarksdale, then the home of W.C. Handy, at the age of 12. - Mark Spoelstra
Mark Warren Spoelstra was an American singer-songwriter and folk and blues guitarist. He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He began his musical career in Los Angeles in his teens and migrated around to wind up in New York City in time to take part in the folk music revival of the early 60s. He is best remembered for his activity in the Greenwich Village area. He performed with Bob Dylan soon after Dylan's arrival in New York City, … - Gordon Bok
Gordon Bok is a folklorist and singer/songwriter who was born on October 31, 1939 in Pennsylvania and grew up in Camden, Maine. His first album, self-titled, was produced by Noel Paul Stookey and released in 1965 on the Verve Records Folkways imprint (not to be confused with Moe Asch's Folkways Records). His second album, "A Tune for November", was released on Sandy Paton's Connecticut-based Folk-Legacy label in 1970. - Sonny Terry
Saunders Terrell, better known as Sonny Terry (24 October 1911, Greenboro, Georgia - 11 March 1986, Mineloa, New York) was a blues musician. He was most widely known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers, and imitations of trains and fox hunts. - Moses Hadas
Moses Hadas was an American teacher, one of the leading classical scholars of the twentieth century, and a translator of numerous works. Raised in Atlanta in a Yiddish Orthodox Jewish household, his early studies included rabbinical training; he graduated from Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1926) and took his doctorate in classics in 1930. He was fluent in Yiddish, German, ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, … - Moe Asch
Moses ("Moe") Asch (born December 2, 1905, Warsaw; died October 19, 1986, New York City) was the founder of Folkways Records. The label, founded in 1948, was instrumental in bringing folk music into the American mainstream. Asch worked with such famous folk and blues singers as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and Ella Jenkins. He was the son of Yiddish language novelist and dramatist Sholem Asch and the younger brother of novelist Nathan Asch. - Alasdair Clayre
Alasdair George S. Clayre (9 October 1935 - 10 January 1984) was a British man of many talents: author, broadcaster, singer-songwriter, and academic. He was educated at Oxford University and was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Clayre took his own life in 1984 by jumping in front of a train. Clayre was born in Southampton on 9 October 1935. He won a scholarship to Winchester College, where he became head boy, and a further scholarship to Oxford University where, … - Oliver Lafarge
Oliver Lafarge (1901-1963) was an American writer and anthropologist. Today he is best known for his novel "Laughing Boy", which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1930. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction. LaFarge, a New Englander of French/Naragansett descent, was a trained anthropologist who discovered two previously unknown languages while on scientific expeditions to Central America and the American Southwest. - Chet Parker
Chet Parker (August, 1891 - 1975) was a hammered dulcimer player from Michigan. Chet Parker was born the son of a blacksmith. His first instruments were the snare drum and the fife. He also learned to play the fiddle (his father was a fiddler) and to read music. He was introduced to the hammered dulcimer by a friend, who loaned him one, in 1900. Chet made his own dulcimer in 1904, and continued to play it the rest of his life. - Happy Traum
Happy Traum (born Harry Peter Traum, 1939, The Bronx, New York City) is an American folk musician who started playing music in the Fifties. Happy began playing guitar and 5-string banjo as a teenager. He attended the High School of Music and Art, where he took up music and was drawn into the folk music boom of the late 1950s. He is a former guitar student of the legendary folk and blues musician Brownie McGhee, … - Nathan Joseph
Nathan "Nat" Joseph (23 July, 1939 - 30 August, 2005) was a noted force in the British music industry, a theatrical producer and talent agent. He was a pioneer in the development of independent record companies in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Birmingham, England, Joseph is best known as the founder of Transatlantic Records - an independent British record company that flourished between 1961-1977. - Robert Sonkowsky
Robert Sonkowsky (also Robert Paul Sonkowsky or Robert P. Sonkowsky) is a professor emeritus of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is an authority on Latin rhetoric and the pronunciation of Golden Age Latin. His bachelor's degree was from Lawrence College, and his PhD is from the University of North Carolina. He is an Honorary Member of the Center for Chronobiology in the Mayo Building, Medical School. - Verna Gillis
Verna Gillis is a free-lance producer who has gained recognition for her work promoting and producing music from various cultural backgrounds. From 1972 to 1978, Gillis recorded traditional music in Afghanistan, Iran, Kashmir, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Peru, Surinam, and Ghana. In 1979, she opened Soundscape, a multi-cultural performance space in New York City, which she directed for the next five years. - Willard Rhodes
Willard Rhodes (b. Deshler, Ohio, 1901; d. Sun City, Arizona, May 15, 1992) was an American ethnomusicologist. He is known for his extensive recording of American Indian music between 1939 and 1952. Rhodes grew up in Dunkirk, Ohio and received A.B. and Bachelor of Music degrees from Wittenberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. He received an M.A. from Columbia University in 1929. In France, he studied with Nadia Boulanger. - Amy Schriefer
Amy Schriefer - Production Coordinator Amy Schriefer joined Folkways in 2004. She has a B.A. in Gender Studies from American University and did graduate work at George Washington University, where she received an M.A. in Women's Studies and a degree in public health. She has worked as a counselor at Planned Parenthood of DC and as a public health researcher for ORC Macro. - Daniel Sheehy
Daniel Sheehy Director and Curator Smithsonian Folkways Recordings - Anthony Seeger
Anthony Seeger - Curator Emeritus Anthony Seeger is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, and musician. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. - Lee Demsey
Lee Demsey, born in California, moved with his family to suburban Maryland in 1960. He became involved in broadcasting while a student at American University, working at the student station as the music director and as a disc jockey. His work at Public Radio station WAMU began shortly before graduation in 1975; he performed various duties there before he started hosting a folk and bluegrass music show weekday afternoons from 1983 to1993. - Pete Reiniger
Pete Reiniger - Sound Production Supervisor Pete Reiniger 's affiliation with the Smithsonian dates from 1973, when he was on the Festival technical crew. He served as Technical Director for the Festival from 1975 to 1977 and from 1991 until 1999. During the 1990s he also became involved with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He is now Sound Production Supervisor and chief engineer for Smithsonian Folkways and has been involved in numerous award-winning recordings. - Richard Burgess
Richard Burgess brings 30 years of international music business experience to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He has been a producer/engineer, artist manager, consultant to major labels, record producer, major label recording artist, studio musician, and independent record label and artist booking agency owner in the UK, Europe, Australasia, and the United States with 14 hit albums and 24 four hit singles. - Mary Monseur
Mary Monseur - Production Manager Mary Monseur came to the Center in 1993 as a Festival volunteer. Following an internship, she served as assistant to the Festival Director in 1994 and continued on as Assistant to the Director and Curator of Smithsonian Folkways. In 1995 she began working on CD productions for Smithsonian Folkways. Together with her colleagues at the label, she has worked with scholars and artists worldwide to produce more than 200 recordings. - Helen Lindsay
Helen Lindsay - Lead Customer Service Representative Helen Lindsay has worked at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings since November 1999. Her duties in Mail Order include quality control for all domestic and international orders. Previously she was employed by Meeting Management Services as Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of Operations and Registration Coordinator for three years. - Edith Fulton Fowke
Edith's next project was one of her most successful publications: Sally Go Round the Sun, a book containing 300 children's songs, rhymes and games, all collected in Canada. Quite possibly this publication is the best known of all Edith's books. Yet, Edith did not have any publication in mind when she first began recording songs in her East York, Toronto neighborhood in 1959. - Bob Everhart
BOB EVERHART Bob is the President of the National Traditional Country Music Assn. , a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation since 1975. He has performed old-time authentic traditional country, folk, and bluegrass music for most of his life, and professionally for the past 50 years. He recorded six LP's for the prestigious Smithsonian/Folkways label, one of them, "Time After Time," nominated for a Grammy personally by Moses Asch. - Keisha Martin
Keisha Martin - Financial Assistant Keisha Martin is the newest addition to the Folkways staff, joining us in 2005 after volunteering at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. Originally from Jamaica, Martin has also lived in New York City and North Carolina, where she received a B.A. in art from the University of North Carolina. Back to Staff List. - Margot Nassau
Margot Nassau - Royalties and Licensing Manager Margot Nassau came to the Smithsonian from the San Francisco Bay area, where she worked in artist management for a decade, representing American blues and "roots" artists. She started her career at a major symphony orchestra after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans with degrees in business management and music. At Folkways, she focuses on royalties, licensing, copyright, and contracts. Back to Staff List. - Mark Gustafson
Mark Gustafson - Marketing Specialist Mark Gustafson joined the Folkways staff in 2002 with almost ten years of experience in music marketing and promotions. He has worked for a record label in Atlanta and for Koch Entertainment, where he handled field marketing and promotions. He lives in Baltimore, where he was born and raised. Back to Staff List.
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