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Legends and Legacies:
An American Folklife Center Celebration of Public Folklore

September 10-11, 2009
Thomas Jefferson Building
Library of Congress
Washington, DC

Participant Biographies

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Barry Bergey
Barry Bergey
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Barry Bergey is Director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).  In addition to managing NEA grants on folk and traditional arts, Bergey directs the NEA National Heritage Fellowships, the premiere American lifetime honors for individual accomplishments in folk and traditional arts.  Bergey provides guidance and support for folk arts infrastructure and statewide apprenticeship programs, as well as technical assistance in the field.  Bergey also provides ongoing counsel to the U.S. Department of State on international cultural policy issues.

Bergey came to the NEA after having served as the State Folk Arts Coordinator in Missouri.  Bergey has been active in the field of cultural heritage for the past thirty years as a fieldworker, festival organizer, radio producer, curator, and arts administrator.  He co-produced I'm Old But I’m Awfully Tough: Traditional Music of the Ozark Region, a recording documenting traditional musicians of the Ozarks and he served as a curator of a touring exhibition The German Housebarn in America: Object and Image.

Bergey's involvement in international arts policy issues has included serving on the U.S. delegation for the UNESCO Intergovernmental Meetings of Experts to Draft a Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, acting as head of the U.S. delegation to the first meeting of the Inter-American Committee on Culture of the Organization of American States in 2003, and serving on the U.S. delegation to UNESCO involved in drafting a proposed Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

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William Ferris
William Ferris
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William R. Ferris is Joel Williamson Eminent Professor of History, Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and Adjunct Professor in the Curriculum in Folklore at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is widely recognized as a leader in Southern studies, African-American music and folklore. He is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prior to his role at NEH, Ferris served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he was a faculty member for eighteen years. Ferris has written and edited ten books and created fifteen documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Pulitzer Prize nominee Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, which contains entries on every aspect of Southern culture and is widely recognized as a major reference work linking popular, folk, and academic cultures.

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Derek Green
Derek Green
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Derek Green, born in 1947, was raised in San Francisco and moved to Illinois with his family in 1959. He graduated from Urbana High School in 1965, and joined the U.S. Navy. After shore duty in Viet Nam and sea duty in the Pacific, he returned to San Francisco in 1968. He began his career in the Electrical Industry at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and entered the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Inside Wireman’s Apprenticeship Program in 1970, completing the apprenticeship in 1974. As a Journeyman Inside Wireman and member of IBEW Local Union 6, San Francisco, California, he worked for various private and public electrical industry employers in Northern California and Alaska until 1999. During these years he served the Local 6 membership on various committees and was elected to the Executive Board. Appointed as a Business Representative in 1999, he is currently serving as Assistant Business Manager. In 2006, he began assisting Archie Green at the Fund for Labor Culture & History, and is currently the Fund’s Treasurer. He lives in Montara, California with his wife Alison. Their three grown children, Shelby, Cecily, and Nathan, live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Paula Johnson
Paula Johnson
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Paula Johnson is Curator, Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History. She has an M.A. in Anthropology and Folklore, University of Texas, Austin, and a B.A. in English from Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota. Her research specialties are American maritime history and traditions, fisheries history, maritime occupations and communities, maritime material culture, boats and boatbuilding, American food and wine history, oral history and folklife documentation, and public history. She is currently Project Director and Curator for the permanent exhibition, On the Water: Stories from Maritime America, among other exhibitions.

 

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J. Keith Kennedy
J. Keith Kennedy
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J. Keith Kennedy is Managing Director of the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Baker Donelson. He joined the firm in September 2006 after some twenty-eight years of service in the United States Senate. For eighteen years he was the majority or minority staff director of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, the largest committee in the Senate, which has jurisdiction over more than a trillion dollars of annual federal spending. The appropriations bills written by the Committee each year influence every activity the federal government undertakes, and constitute the only legislation that the Congress must pass every year. Prior to his service on the Appropriations Committee, Mr. Kennedy served as the Deputy Sergeant at Arms of the Senate from April 2003 to January 2005. In that position, he was the chief operating officer of the Senate's largest organization. In addition to providing security for Senators, their staffs, and the million annual visitors to the Capitol, the Sergeant at Arms procures and provides all information technology and telecommunications equipment and service for the Senate, both in Washington and in the state offices of Senators.

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Jon Lohman
John Lohman
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Jon Lohman is the Director of the Virginia Folklife Program and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. As the state folklorist, he works to document, present, and support Virginia's rich cultural folkways, through a variety of media including audio and video documentation, exhibit design, public programming, and project development. He has produced numerous bluegrass, old-time, and gospel releases for Virginia Folklife Recordings. He has presented at numerous festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the National Folklife Festival, Merlefest, the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival, the American Folk Festival, and others. Jon has published scholarly and popular writings on such topics as Mardi Gras, murals and memorial walls, duck decoy carving, and southern folklore.


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Judith McCulloh
Judith McCulloh
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Judith McCulloh completed her Ph.D in folklore at Indiana University and spent over thirty five years at the University of Illinois Press where her most recent positions included Executive Editor, Assistant Director, and Director of Development. She also edited the renowned Music in American Life series, making her an important force in expanding and transforming ethnomusicology scholarship. She is co-editor of The Stars of Country Music (1975). McCulloh is also a former president of the American Folklore Society and has served for many years on the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. She is currently an emerita member of the Board of Trustees.


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Hilary Clinton with Mick Moloney Mick Moloney, right, receiving the National Heritage Fellowship Award from then First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1999.
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Mick Moloney is an internationally renowned performer and scholar in the field of Irish traditional music.  He has recorded and produced over forty albums of traditional music, and acted as advisor for scores of festivals and concerts all over America. Mick also served as the artistic director for several major arts tours including The Green Fields of America, an NCTA-sponsored ensemble of Irish musicians, singers and dancers which toured across the United States.

Mick is the author of Far From the Shamrock Shore: The story of Irish American History Through Song, released by Crown Publications in February of 2002 with an accompanying CD on Shanachie Records.  He has hosted three nationally syndicated series of folk music on American Public Television; was a consultant, performer and interviewee on the Irish Television special Bringing It All Back Home; a participant, consultant and music arranger of the PBS documentary film Out of Ireland; and a performer on the PBS special The Irish in America: Long Journey Home. In 1999, he was awarded the a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts — the highest official honor a traditional artist can receive in the United States.  

Mick holds a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught ethnomusicology, folklore and Irish studies courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, and Villanova Universities, and currently teaches at New York University in the Irish Studies program.  

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Mike Munoz
Mike Munoz
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Mike Munoz is a journeyman Pile Driver and a thirty-three year member of Pile Drivers Local 34 in Oakland, California. He has been a union organizer since 1981 and is currently Director of Organizing for the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council. In 1986 he wrote and published Pile Butt — a Collection of Stories on Pile Driving, and in 2001 assisted filmmaker Maria Brooks in the production of her film, Pile Butts — Working Under the Hammer. He sits on the boards of the Fund for Labor Culture and History and the San Francisco State Labor Archives, and is a member of the Bay Area Labor History Workshop. In 1974, Munoz's leg was crushed while working in the field, and in 1977 he was injured by a collapsing dock. While recuperating from the second accident, he was appointed historian of Pile Drivers Local 34 by the president, Gary Bakke. While organizing the union's archive, he found a small booklet called Stewards on the Job, written by business agent Jack Wagner during WWII. In the booklet were eleven linoleum cuts by Giacomo Patri — these illustrations changed his life. It has been his passion to document the history of the Pile Drivers Union and the Regional Council of Carpenters and to use what he has learned to bring workers into the Union and understand what union membership truly means to working people.

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Julia Olin
Julia Olin
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Julia Olin is Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA). She has been involved with the research, documentation and public presentation of traditional music and culture for 36 years. Since joining the National Council for the Traditional Arts in 1990, Olin has organized, directed or produced twenty-seven national tours, been involved in the planning, artistic direction and production of forty-seven national festivals, twenty-three recordings of traditional music, and twenty-two programs for public radio and television. She has worked with national parks across the nation to develop cultural programs. Prior to her association with the NCTA, Olin conducted extensive fieldwork in Missouri and Arkansas that resulted in a major collection of traditional music, ballads and stories. Olin was also involved in the programming and production of numerous regional traditional arts events and programs, and enjoyed a successful career as a vocalist and musician.

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Dan Sheehy.
Dan Sheehy
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Daniel Sheehy is the Acting Director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage; Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution; and Curator of the Folkways Collection. He served as Director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1992 to 2000 and as staff ethnomusicologist and Assistant Director from 1978-1992. Sheehy supervised the National Heritage Fellowship awards and grants programs providing approximately $4 million annually for projects in the folk and traditional arts across the United States and its territories. A Fulbright Hays scholar in Veracruz, Mexico, he earned his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA. He served as co-editor of the South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Dan Sheehy serves on the NCTA Board of Directors.

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Nick Spitzer
Nick Spitzer
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Nick Spitzer Nick Spitzer is host and creator of American Routes, a weekly two-hour radio program devoted to vernacular music, musicians and culture. He is also professor of American studies and communication at Tulane University, and an adjunct research professor of anthropology and urban studies at the University of New Orleans. Nick has been a commentator and producer for ABC's Nightline, NPR's All Things Considered and Fresh Air and PBS's Great Performances, he directed the ethnographic film Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana, and has produced numerous annotated field recordings. Spitzer served as founding director of the Louisiana Folklife program, editing Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to the State, and Mississippi Delta Ethnographic Overview for the National Park Service. He served as senior folklife specialist at the Smithsonian, as artistic director of the Folk Masters series at Carnegie Hall, and of the American Roots Independence Day concerts, broadcast from the National Mall (1992-2001). In 2002, Nick led a research and exhibition team for "Raised to the Trade": Creole Building Arts of New Orleans at the New Orleans Museum of Art. A former scholar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, he received the Benjamin Botkin Award in Public Folklore, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for American Routes, and was named Louisiana Humanist of the Year for cultural recovery efforts after the 2005 catastrophe in New Orleans. In 2007, Nick was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for work on traditional creativity in Louisiana Creole communities.

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Andy Wallace
Andy Wallace
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Andy Wallace has been involved with traditional music and culture for the past forty years. He spent fifteen years directing the NCTA's National Folk Festival and five years with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and has organized numerous other festivals and tours. Andy was a founding member of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington. An active performer on the folk music scene during the 1960s and '70s, Andy worked with Jonathan Eberhart and Mike Rivers in the Ringshouters, and with Pete Seeger as a member of the original crew of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. He was also a solo artist. He has recorded with Jonathan Eberhart, Helen Schneyer, Louis Killen and Pete Seeger, among others, and has appeared on NPR and public television. Andy's repertoire reflects his broad musical tastes and includes ballads, sea chanteys, Southern and New England dance tunes, cowboy songs, and Cajun and Quebecois songs and tunes.

Joseph T. Wilson - Follow this link to a biography of Joe Wilson.

 

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