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The Lomax Legacy:
Folklore in a Globalizing Century

Participant Biographies

Robert Baron has served as the Folk Arts Program Director at the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) since its establishment in 1985. He also served as the Director of NYSCA's Museum Program from 1996-2000, and as Senior Research Specialist in the Education Division of The Brooklyn Museum from 1977-79. Baron is a Non-Resident Fellow in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. From 2000-2001, while on leave of absence from NYSCA, he acted as Folklore Administrator of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has received grants to serve as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Turku, Finland and for field research in St. Lucia from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Baron has served as President of the Middle Atlantic Folklife Association, on the boards of the American Folklore Society, Fund for Folk Culture, Middle Atlantic Arts Foundation and National Council for the Traditional Arts and as an adjunct lecturer in the American Studies Program at Rutgers -- Newark. In 2002, Baron received the Benjamin A. Botkin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Folklore from the American Folklore Society. He has published extensively in the areas of public folklore, Afro-Atlantic folklore, museum studies, creolization and the history of folklore studies. Baron's publications include Public Folklore, ed. with Nicholas R. Spitzer, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992; a 2003 special issue of the Journal of American Folklore on creolization edited with Ana Cara, and articles in Curator, Museum News, the Journal of Folklore Research and Western Folklore. He holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and an AB from the University of Chicago.

John Bishop is documentary film and video producer of many ethnographic and cultural documentaries, including A Place for Jazz, The Land Where the Blues Began (with Alan Lomax and Worth Long), Hosay Trinidad, Himalayan Herders, New England Fiddles, and Oh! What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me: Edmund Carpenter. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the World Arts and Cultures Program at UCLA. At the university he directs a video-editing lab for the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, which now has 20 non-linear editing bays and serves more than 100 students per quarter. He has written numerous articles and five books, including California Artists: At the Crossroads (1991), about traditional arts in California, and An Ever-Changing Place (1978), about doing fieldwork in Nepal. Since 1971 he and his wife, anthropologist Naomi Bishop, have engaged in continuing fieldwork in a Himalayan village. He worked intensively with the UCLA National Dance/Media Project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and has taken students to the Pacific Arts Festival (Samoa 1996, New Caledonia 2000) as part of an on-going World Arts and Cultures initiative to make a long term video record of this festival. Bishop was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 for his many accomplishments and years of service to the field of visual ethnography by the Society for Visual Anthropology, a subsection of the American Anthropological Association.

Photograph of Peggy A. Bulger.
Peggy A. Bulger

Peggy A. Bulger is director of the American Folklife Center, the second person to hold that position since the Center was created by the U.S. Congress in 1976. A native of New York State, she holds a B. A. in fine arts from the State University of New York at Albany, an M. A. in folk studies from Western Kentucky University, and a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. A folklorist, consultant, and producer, Bulger has been documenting folklife and developing and managing folklife programs for more than thirty years. She has been Florida State Folk Arts Coordinator (1976-79), Florida Folklife Programs Administrator (1979-89), and Program Coordinator, Director, and Senior Officer for the Southern Arts Federation (1989-99). Bulger is the author of South Florida Folklife, with Tina Bucuvalas and Stetson Kennedy (1994), and the editor of Musical Roots of the South (1992). She is the producer of many videos, including Music Masters & Rhythm Kings (1993), Every Island Has Its Own Songs: The Tsimouris Family of Tarpon Springs (1988), Fishing All My Days: Maritime Traditions of Florida's Shrimpers (1985); and a number of recordings, including Deep South Musical Roots Tour (1992) and Drop On Down in Florida (1981). She is a member of a number of professional organizations, including the New York, Kentucky, and Florida folklore societies, and she served as president of the American Folklore Society (2000-2002).

Photograph of Donald Hill.
Dave Burrell

Dave Burrell, composer and pianist, is a performing artist of singular stature on the international contemporary music scene. His dynamic compositions, rooted in the blues and gospel music, recall the tradition of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington. After graduating with degrees in composition/arranging and performance from the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1965, he moved to New York City, where he quickly established himself as one of the most innovative and original pianists collaborating with the emerging leaders in contemporary jazz. He is renowned for his many pivotal recordings with tenor saxophonists Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown and Grammy-Award winner David Murray, and tuba player Bob Stewart. During the last 30 years Dave Burrell has appeared on over 100 recordings, including several of his own, such as High Won High Two, Echo, Teardrops for Jimmy, Jelly Roll Joys, Windward Passages, Daybreak, Brother to Brother, Dave Burrell Plays Ellington and Monk, Esquisses For A Walk, Dave Burrell Live at Caramoor. Burrell's Jazz Opera Windward Passage, written in collaboration with Swedish-born poet/lyricist Monika Larsson in 2005, blends opera voices with world class jazz soloists, a 21-piece jazz opera orchestra, dancers and chorus. He appears regularly on national and international TV and radio broadcasts, including NPR's bicentennial tribute to Jelly Roll Morton, Dr. Jazz, and Duke Ellington's centennial Duke and the Piano in 2004. Burrell performed his arrangement of Louis Armstrong's "Struttin With Some Barbeque" as part of NPR's The Wonderful World Of Louis Armstrong in 2000. In 1996, Burrell was commissioned to compose the soundtrack to MacArthur-recipient Louis Massiah's documentary film epic, W.E.B. DuBois - A Biography in Four Voices. A frequent lecturer, Dave Burrell's Master Classes have been held at the Strasbourg Conservatory and Conservatoire Municipal, Paris, France; Guildhall School of Music and Dance, London; New York University; Queens College; University of Pennsylvania; Duquesne University; Swarthmore College; Bryn Mawr College; Brandeis University and Rice University. At present, he is a Music Mentor at the Philadelphia Clef Club and the Inter-Cultural Center in Philadelphia. Burrell has received numerous grants, nominations and awards, from institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Music Foundation, William J. Cooper Foundation, NY State Council on the Arts, Meet The Composer. He was awarded the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts in Jazz Composition 1996-98 and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Jazz Composition 1999. For more information on Burrell, please visit his website at http://www.daveburrell.com/.External Link

Photograph of Norma Cantu.
Norma Cantú

Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska--Lincoln. She is the editor of a book series, Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition, at Texas A&M University Press and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Author of the award-winning Canícula Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, and co-editor of Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, she has just finished a novel, Cabañuelas. She is currently working on another novel tentatively titled Champú, or Hair Matters, and an ethnography of the Matachines de la Santa Cruz, a religious dance drama from Laredo, Texas.

Photograph of Judith Cohen.
Judith Cohen

Judith Cohen is an ethnomusicologist specializing in Sephardic music, music of Spain and Portugal, including traditions of the Portuguese Crypto-Jews; and related traditions, including Balkan, Yiddish, and Franco-Canadian music, and pan-European ballads. She earned her M. A. in Medieval Studies and her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the Université de Montréal, and teaches part-time at York University, Toronto. She is General Editor of the Spain recordings of the Alan Lomax Rounder Records series and is preparing the Spain entries for the database catalogue. Dr. Cohen has spoken on Alan Lomax's work in Spain at several conferences, and has located and interviewed almost all the surviving artists who recorded for him in Spain in 1952. Cohen's recent research projects include: music and the construction of identity in the "Three Cultures" festivals in Spain and Portugal; music in the lives of Crypto-Jews in Portugal and the Balearic Islands, the history and ethnography of the Iberian square frame drum, music practice and reception in the medieval period, old and new musical worlds of Ibiza, and ongoing research on Sephardic music. Over the past year and a half she has presented papers at the World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem), the international "Music and the Art of Seduction" conference (Amsterdam), and the Canadian Society for Traditional Music (Vancouver). She was an invited speaker at the Music of the Mediterranean section of the ICTM (Venice) and the Symposium on Sephardic Ballads of Alcazarquivir, Morocco (Lisbon), and gave the 2004 keynote lecture for the International Society for the Study of Medievalism (Fredericton). A performer of the traditions she studies, Cohen gives frequent concerts and lectures in Spain and Portugal, often with her daughter Tamar, with whom she recently recorded the CD Sefarad en Diaspora, following the earlier Canciones de Sefarad on the Spanish label Pneuma.

Ronald D. Cohen is Professor of History Emeritus, Indiana University Northwest, Gary, IN. He is the author or editor of numerous publications, including: "Wasn't That a Time!: Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival (1995); Moonlight in Duneland: The Illustrated Story of the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad (1998); Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography (1999); Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (2002, selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic book); Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 (2003); Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (2004); Folk Music: The Basics (2006). He is also the co-producer of three CD compilations: Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs and the American Left, 1926-1954 (1996, winner of the 1997 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research); Goodnight Irene: The Weavers, 1949-1953 (2000); The Best of Broadside: 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground From the Pages of Broadside Magazine (2000) (nominated for two Grammies, and winner of two Indie awards from the Association For Independent Music). Cohen is also the editor of the "American Folk Music and Musicians" book series for Scarecrow Press.

Photograph of Victor Grauer.
Bill Ferris

William R. Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also serves as Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South and Adjunct Professor in the Curriculum on Folklore. He is a widely recognized leader in Southern studies, African American music and folklore, and well-known for his writings on William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, and race relations in the South. Ferris, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a prolific documentarian of blues music and Southern culture. Ferris has discovered many compelling stories during his distinguished career in the course of conducting thousands of interviews with musicians ranging from the famous (B.B. King) to the unrecognized (Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields). He has written or edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (UNC Press, 1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His other books include: Mule Trader: Ray Lum's Tales of Horses, Mules and Men (1992), Local Color (1982, 1992), Images of the South: Visits with Eudora Welty and Walker Evans (1978), Mississippi Black Folklore: A Research Bibliography and Discography (1971) and Blues from the Delta (1970, 1978, 1988).

Photograph of Victor Grauer.
Victor Grauer

Victor Grauer, based in Pittsburgh, PA, is a composer, musicologist, film maker, media artist, poet and dramatist. He holds a Masters Degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (1961) and a Ph. D. in Music Composition from SUNY Buffalo (1972). He was co-creator, with Alan Lomax, of the Cantometric coding system in 1961 and worked on the Cantometrics Project as Research Associate, under Lomax's supervision, at the Bureau of Applied Social Work, Columbia University, from 1963 through 1966. His creative work has been presented at institutions such as Lincoln Center (the New York Film Festival), The Millennium (New York), the Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo), Hallwalls (Buffalo), Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh), the Film London Festival, The Kitchen (New York), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), the Birmingham Lofts (Pittsburgh), The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the Center for Contemporary Art (Cincinnati), the Barbican Center (London), etc. Films of his are in the permanent collections of Carnegie Institute, the University of Pittsburgh and the Anthology Archives, New York. Four of his short films were screened as part of the American Century retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2000. His writings on musicology and the arts have been published in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Semiotica, Art Criticism, Music Theory Online and the Millennium Film Journal. In 1998 he received the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award. Grauer has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, the Pittsburgh High School of the Creative and Performing Arts and Chatham College. He is presently engaged in research linking his work with Lomax on Cantometrics with current developments in genetic anthropology and archaeology.

Jeffrey A. Greenberg, is co-Producer of the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records and Legal Advisor to the Association for Cultural Equity and Alan Lomax's Estate. A partner in Beldock Levine and Hoffman LLP, a firm founded by distinguished civil rights lawyers and folk music advocates, Jeffrey specializes in entertainment and intellectual property law, and represents musicians, music publishers, film and television producers, festival, tour and live event producers, event marketers, actors, comedians, screenwriters, composers, and television and radio personalities. His producer credits include the 100-CD series, the Alan Lomax Collection; Popular Songbook (2003), and in 2005, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings, all on Rounder Records; Terrance Simien, There's Room For US All (Black Top 1993); Rob Wasserman, Trilogy (Rounder Records 2004); Genevieve Waite, Romance Is On The Rise (Chrome Dreams 2004); John Phillips, John, The Wolfking of L.A. (Varese Sarabande 2006). Jeffrey holds a J. D. cum laude from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Preston D. Hardison is an environmental policy analyst and biocultural landscape restoration specialist with the Tulalip Tribes of Washington with training in evolutionary biology and conservation biology. With the Tulalip Tribes, he is involved in the development of the "Cultural Stories Project," specifically the design of software and methodologies for recording tribal environmental history and traditional ecological knowledge to develop environmental baselines for biocultural landscape restoration. The project's aim is to create a tribal digital archive and information system to help tribal planners and members revitalize their connections to the landscape and maintain a tribal environmental history. As part of this project and his other activities, he maintains an extensive database on regional and global research and activities on traditional knowledge, biodiversity conservation, and community-based conservation which he freely shares with others. He is also developing tribal protocols for accessing this information. He also represents the Tulalip Tribes in meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on the protection and use of traditional knowledge. Since 1995, he has participated in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and serves on a global panel of the CBD to review the status of and trends in the preservation and promotion of traditional knowledge. Hardison has been working closely with representatives of indigenous communities on issues relating to the implementation of Article 8(j) and other articles of the Convention which refer to nation-states' obligations to "preserve, promote and respect" traditional knowledge related to the conservation of biodiversity. Hardison is interested in developing new relationships between academics, governments, citizens and tribes that promotes respect for tribal traditions, the equal standing of native science with Western science, and the use of traditional knowledge for environmental management and restoration. He publishes on policy issues related to the protection and use of traditional knowledge. Hardison received a BA in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979.

Photograph of Todd Harvey.
Tod Harvey

Todd Harvey is a collections specialist in Reference at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress and curator of the Alan Lomax Collection. Todd and other curators at the Folklife Center coordinate a range of activities for collections that generate unusual public interest, from facilitating the processing and preservation of materials to fulfilling researcher requests for access and publication. Todd also curates the Folklife Center's Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection and the International Storytelling Collection. In winter 2004, Todd participated in the Department of State's Speaker and Specialist program to celebrate Black History Month. Teams from the Association for Cultural Equity and Folklife Center presented a program highlighting recordings made by Alan Lomax to audiences in nine European countries. Previously, Todd's research interest in the 1960's folk revival led to a post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the publication of the book, The Formative Dylan: Transmission and Stylistic Influences, 1961-1963, (Scarecrow Press, 2001). The book examines the lyric and melodic roots of seventy songs from Bob Dylan's early repertoire, including the first three Columbia LP's, subsequent releases from those recording sessions, and Dylan's Folkways recordings. Todd holds a library science degree (MSLS) from the Catholic University of America as well as degrees in music composition (MM, DMA) from the Ohio State University.

Photograph of Donald Hill.
Donald Hill

Donald R. Hill, Professor of Anthropology and Africana/Latino Studies (Chair, 1996- Spring 1999) at State University College at Oneonta, New York (since Sept. 1978), received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Indiana University (1973). He was Curator of Education at the American Museum of Natural History (1973-1975) and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at City University of New York - Hunter College (1975-1978). Dr. Hill has taught courses in Africana Studies, cultural anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology for over 40 years. His most noted academic publications are Calypso Calaloo: Early Trinidadian Carnival Music (University Press of Florida, 1993, co- winner of the 1994 University of Chicago Folklore Prize and one of the first academic books to include a CD); The Impact of Migration on the Metropolitan and Folk Society of Carriacou, Grenada (American Museum of Natural History, 1977); 'Rastlin' Jacob': the Music of the Spiritual Baptists of Trinidad - The 1939 Field Recordings of Melville & Frances Herskovits, Vol. 2 (CD producer and co-author of booklet, Rounder Records 1115, 2003); and "Music in the African Diaspora in the Americas" (in Ember, Ember, and Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005). Hill has annotated, produced, and/or made field recordings for 22 long-playing records and CDs. He is co-author of "'Play Mas' in Brooklyn" (Natural History, August 1979) and author of "Trinidad Pan" (Natural History, Feb. 1995). He is currently digitizing approximately 1200 hours of his audio and video field recordings (live vernacular music; interviews; music and interviews from local radio broadcasts in Brooklyn, Mexico, and the Caribbean; audio notes of rituals and festivals) recorded in the Americas, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and West Africa since 1955. Hill has been an expert consultant or has contributed recordings to very many film documentaries, public radio broadcasts, and other media.

Photograph of Jake Homiak.
Jake Homiak

Jake Homiak received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1985. He is currently the Director of the Anthropology Collection & Archives Program at the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. He has general oversight for the Department of Anthropology's nearly two and a half million cultural artifacts and archaeological specimens as well as the manuscript, photographic, and film holdings of its National Anthropological Archives and the Human Studies Film Archives. Homiak coordinates access and outreach to a broad range of scholars and Native visitors who use these resources for academic research, publication, exhibition, and heritage research. Under Homiak's direction, the Collections & Archives Program has made historic images and their associated data accessible to many Native American communities. Homiak's interests include issues of representation in ethnographic filmmaking; the ways in which historic visual materials are used in contemporary ethnographic research; and ways that indigenous artists and filmmakers currently draw upon such materials to re-assert their identities and associated social and political interests. Homiak is also a long-term researcher of Jamaican culture and the broader Anglophone Caribbean. He is currently working on an exhibition, Discovering Rastafari!, slated to open in May 2007. This project engages many of the thorny issues of voice and representation that accompany contemporary cultural collaborations and initiatives. Among Homiak's recent publications are: "Understanding a Modern Antique: Challenges to Representing Rastafari in the Twenty-First Century," New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 79 (no. 1&2). 2005; A Kalahari Family: "Some Notes on Reflexivity, Voice and Social Location," Visual Anthropology Review, 19(1&2):128-134, 2003 (Robert Gordon, guest editor); and "Images of the Sacred, Embodiments of the Other: Representing Religious Experience on Film and Video," in Stephen Glazier and Charles Flowerday, eds., Selected Readings in the Anthropology of Religion: Theoretical and Methodological Essays, (New York: Praeger Books, 2003).

Nancy Johnson's deep interest in history, especially primary source materials, led her to a career as an archivist. She studied American history and art history at SUNY Stony Brook and at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, before working for many years at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honorary organization for artists, writers and composers. There she established the organization's archives, mounted exhibitions of books, manuscripts and memorabilia, and wrote extensively about the Academy's history and collections. Since 1996, she has worked as an archival consultant, working primarily with arts-related organizations. Nancy first collaborated with folklorists in 1997, working on the New York Folklore Society's ongoing folklore in archives project. That project took her for the first time to the Alan Lomax Archive, and led to an archival survey of the paper-based records there. Since then she has worked with the staff there to make Lomax's immense and complex collection more accessible to the interested public. During the winter of 2004-05 she began arranging and describing the papers relating to Lomax's Performance Style and Culture Projects -- Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics -- in preparation for transferring the material to the Library of Congress. In addition to the Lomax Archive, Nancy has worked with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and City Lore, and several other folk arts organizations, as well as the Montclair Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Lotos Club. She has served on the Board of Directors of the New York Folklore Society since 1999, and for several years wrote a column entitled "Archival Questions" for the Society's journal Voices. Nancy lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her twin daughters.

Bertram Lyons is Project Manager and Archivist, at the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive, New York. He has over six years experience as an Operations Manager for festivals, concerts, and conferences in Memphis, New Orleans, and New York City. During his tenure at ACE and the Archive, Lyons has heped develop the shape, scope, and delivery of all the archive’s major projects. He is currently cataloging and editing the Vera Ward Hall, Newport Folk Festival, and Miscellaneous Recordings collections for the Alan Lomax Database. Lyons is also organizing and coordinating the preservation of Alan Lomax’s Performance Style and Culture audio materials prior to their transfer to the American Folklife Center. He is largely responsible for organizing, compiling, and digitizing the archive’s source materials for access via the online Alan Lomax Database, as well as physically disseminating these materials and their catalogs to regional archives and repositories in the Caribbean, Europe and the US. Previously, Lyons oversaw the systematic digital organization of the archive’s audio and image holdings, introducing non-CD digital storage and access technologies into the archives, and supervised the assembly of comprehensive catalogs for each of these digital collections. He also coordinated the transfer of Alan Lomax’s source folklore and fieldwork materials to the Library of Congress in 2004. Lyons represented ACE/Alan Lomax Archive at the New York State Folk Arts Roundtable in Skaneateles, New York in 2005, and delivered a presentation on "Community Collaboration and Dissemination," which focused on digital dissemination and the online Alan Lomax Database. Lyons received his BA in English Literature from Earlham College in Richmond, IN.

Deanna Marcum was appointed Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress on August 11, 2003. In this capacity she manages 53 divisions and offices whose 2,400 employees are responsible for acquisitions, cataloging, public service and preservation activities, services to the blind and physically handicapped, and developing network and bibliographic standards for America's national library. She is also responsible for integrating the emerging digital resources into the traditional artifactual library-the first step toward building a national digital library for the 21st century. In 1995, Dr. Marcum was appointed president of the Council on Library Resources and president of the Commission on Preservation and Access. She oversaw the merger of these two organizations into the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in 1997 and served as president until August 2003. CLIR's mission is to identify the critical issues that affect the welfare and prospects of libraries and archives and the constituencies they serve, convene individuals and organizations in the best position to engage these issues and respond to them, and encourage institutions to work collaboratively to achieve and manage change. Dr. Marcum served as Director of Public Service and Collection Management at the Library of Congress from 1993-95. Before that she was the Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at The Catholic University of America. From 1980 to 1989, she was first a program officer and then vice president of the Council on Library Resources. Dr. Marcum holds a Ph.D. in American Studies, a master's degree in Library Science, and a bachelor's degree in English.

Photograph of Bill Nowlin.
Bill Nowlin

Bill Nowlin grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Lexington High School, Tufts University (B. A. and Ph. D. in political science), and University of Chicago (M. A.). Bill is one of three co-founders of Rounder Records (1970), one of America's most active independent record companies. He remains active in the daily running of Rounder, as well as its new Rounder Books imprint. Rounder Records has released more than 3,000 albums -- mostly original productions -- of American and world music over the past 35 years. He is particularly proud of the work that Rounder has done assisting in the publication and dissemination of the Alan Lomax Collection recordings. Nowlin served for the first dozen years of Rounder Records' existence as a professor of political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Finding his work with Rounder Records more of a true calling, Nowlin retired from teaching in 1982. Nowlin has authored, co-authored, or edited more than a dozen books on Boston Red Sox baseball, most notably Ted Williams: The Pursuit of Perfection and Blood Feud: The Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Struggle of Good vs. Evil (2005). He has written over 100 articles for various newspapers, magazines, and journals. For the past seven years, Bill has served as editor of publications for the non-profit Ted Williams Museum and Retrospective Library. Bill has served on the Board of Directors for the Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center in Cambridge, and on the Board of Governors of the Texas chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which awards the Grammy. Bill is Vice President of the 7000-member Society for American Baseball Research.

Betsy Peterson is the Executive Director for the Fund for Folk Culture, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Prior to joining the FFC as Program Director in 1998, she was a consultant working for clients such as The Wallace Foundation, the Southern Arts Federation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Carnegie Hall and The Ford Foundation. On behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts, she wrote, edited and compiled The Changing Faces of Tradition: A Report on the Folk and Traditional Arts in the United States (1996). Peterson earned her doctorate in folklore from Indiana University and was Director of the Traditional Arts Program at the New England Foundation for the Arts from 1990 to 1993. She co-founded Texas Folklife Resources with Pat Jasper and Kay Turner, serving as Program Coordinator from 1985 to 1989. In 1990, she was a visiting professor at the Folklore and Mythology Program at UCLA. Peterson has conducted field research throughout Texas, the South and New England and has developed numerous public folk arts programs and services, including festivals, exhibitions, conferences, workshops, radio programs and recordings. She also co-produced Joy Unspeakable (1981), an award-winning video documentary on Pentecostalism. Peterson was appointed Executive Director of the FFC in August, 2003.

Photograph of Goffredo Plastino.
Goffredo Plastino

Goffredo Plastino is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the International Centre for Music Studies of the University of Newcastle, united Kingdom. He is the editor of Italian Treasury, a CD series in the Alan Lomax Collection drawing upon the Italian recordings made by Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella during 1954-55; the two recorded traditional music all over the country, capturing the music of regions that soon after would undergo many significant cultural changes. Plastino's publications include Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Musics and Global Sounds (Routledge, 2003) and Tambores del Bajo Aragón [Drums of Bajo Aragón], (PRAMES, 2001), a book with accompanying CD. In November 2005, Plastino and Luisa Del Giudice curated the photographic exhibit, Alan Lomax in the Salento: Ethnographic Photographs from the 1950's at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (IIC) in Los Angeles. He is currently writing a book on crime songs in Southern Italy.

Photograph of Colin Quigley.
Colin Quigley

Colin Quigley is Associate Professor in the Culture and Performance Program, Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. He is also affiliated with the Department of Ethnomusicology at the university. His research interests include European and European-American traditional music and dance, and he specializes in folklore, ethnochoreology, and ethnomusicology. He has taught in the Folklore Department of Memorial University, Newfoundland, and was a post-doctoral research fellow at its Centre d'Etudes Franco-Terreneuviennes. Quigley was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to Romania during 1997-98, and served as curator for the Romanian program in the 1999 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Quigley has taught and performed Anglo-, Celtic-, and Franco-American traditional music and dance throughout the United States and Canada. His monograph, Close to the Floor: Folk Dance in Newfoundland (1985), is an investigation of relationships between dance forms and dance events. Quigley's book, Music From the Heart (1995), examines the interplay of creativity and tradition in the composition of French Newfoundland fiddle music. Quigley is an associated member of the Section On Cultural & Social Anthropology of The Institute For Cultural Anthropology at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. He is currently investigating how changes in ideologies of national and ethnic identity affect folklore performance in post-communist Europe. Quigley received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles and his Master of Arts from Memorial University, Newfoundland.

Nathan Salsburg has worked at the Alan Lomax Archive since 2000. He is currently the production coordinator of the Alan Lomax Collection CD series on Rounder Records and editor for the Alan Lomax Database, having cataloged Lomax's fieldtrips in Great Britain, Morocco, and the American South. Salsburg is a musician, writer, and radio producer, and currently hosts the vernacular music program, "Goodbye Dear Old Stepstone" on WPS1 radio, the internet station of the Museum of Modern Art and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Salsburg is editing a book with civil rights activist and folklorist Stetson Kennedy entitled Land Be Bright: A Stetson Kennedy Reader. He is also collaborating on a CD release of the recordings of Nimrod Workman, the late coal miner and ballad singer, with the June Appal imprint of Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Salsburg is a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and a graduate of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

Photograph of Henry Sapoznik
Henry Sapoznik

Henry Sapoznik is an award winning author, radio and record producer and performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. A pioneering scholar and performer of klezmer music, he founded "KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program" in 1985, and is the Executive Director of "Living Traditions" the folk arts organization which runs it. His book, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World was the winner of the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Scholarship. He co-produced the 10 part series the "Yiddish Radio Project" for National Public Radio's All Things Considered in the spring of 2002 which won the prestigious Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism in 2002. A Grammy nominated performer/producer, he has produced 25 reissues of historic recordings including an unprecedented four volume CD anthology of Yiddish 78s 1912-1950 and in 2005 a three-CD box set of legendary country music pioneer Charlie Poole, both for Columbia Legacy. Nominated for a 2002 Emmy award for his music score to the documentary film The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Sapoznik plays banjo and sings with both the Yiddish music trio "The Youngers of Zion" and the old time American music ensemble "The Brooklyn Corn Dodgers."

Photograph of Dan Sheehy.
Dan Sheehy

Daniel Sheehy is the 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.

Photograph of Gigi Sohn.
Gigi Sohn

Gigi B. Sohn holds a B. S. in Broadcasting and Film, Summa Cum Laude, from the Boston University College of Communication, and a J. D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is the President and Co-Founder of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization that addresses the public's stake in the convergence of communications policy and intellectual property law. Public Knowledge seeks to ensure that the three layers of our communications system -- the physical infrastructure, the systems and the content layer -- promote fundamental democratic principles and cultural values including openness, access, and the capacity to create and compete. Sohn serves as the chief strategist, fundraiser and public face of Public Knowledge. She is frequently quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as in trade and local press. She has had articles published in the Washington Post, Variety, CNET and Legal Times. In addition, she has appeared on numerous national and local cable, broadcast television and radio programs, including the Today Show, The McNeil-Lehrer Report, Fox News Channel, C-SPAN's Washington Journal and National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Sohn is a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Law, Graduate Studies Program in Melbourne, Australia. She was previously Executive Director of the Media Access Project (MAP), a Washington, DC based public interest telecommunications law firm that represents citizens' rights before the Federal Communications Commission and the courts. In recognition of her work at MAP, President Clinton appointed her to serve as a member of his Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters ("Gore Commission") in October 1997. In that same year, she was selected by the American Lawyer magazine as one of the leading public sector lawyers in the country under the age of 45.

Photograph of Nick Spitzer.
Nick Spitzer

Nick Spitzer, host and producer of the popular, nationally syndicated radio program American Routes, is a folklorist specializing in American music and cultures of the Gulf South. He is also professor of folklore and cultural conservation at the University of New Orleans. The former host, artistic director, and producer of the award-winning music program Folk Masters, Spitzer is also a contributor of features on American music and culture to Natonal Public Radio's All Things Considered. In 1993, he initiated an annual American Roots 4th of July concert, broadcast live from the National Mall on NPR. Spitzer's radio experience goes back to the 1970s, when he served first as program director of WXPN-FM, the college radio station at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he majored in anthropology. After graduation, he was afternoon drive host on the popular "underground" rock station WMMR-FM in Philadelphia. Spitzer later worked as a deejay on the legendary progressive country station, KOKE-FM during the early boom days of the Austin music scene. As Louisiana State Folklorist (1978-85), he created films, festivals, exhibits and recordings of regional music, and co-produced a 90-minute special on Louisiana music, Folk Festival USA, for NPR, helping to bring Cajun music and zydeco to national visibility. His work continued at the Smithsonian Institution, where he curated folk festival programs and directed or served as commentator in films about American music including Great Performances, broadcast on PBS and the Discovery Channel. In 1995 for his work with Creole cultures, he was named as a fellow at the School of American Research in Santa Fe. He has also served on the boards of the American Folklore Society, Fund for Folk Culture, and National Council for the Traditional Arts. Spitzer holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Texas, having done his research with African-French Louisiana Creoles and zydeco music.

Photograph of John Szwed.
John Szwed

John Szwed is John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University, and Louis Armstrong Professor of Jazz Studies at Columbia University. His Ph.D. is in anthropology and is from Ohio State University, and his work as an anthropologist and folklorist includes field studies in Newfoundland, the Georgia Sea Islands, and Trinidad. As a musician, he studied trombone with Donald Reinhart, music theory with Mervin Hutton, and played professionally for twelve years. He has taught at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania (where he was Director of the Center for Urban Ethnography and Chair of the Department of Folklore), and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He is also President of Brilliant Corners, a non-profit music production company in New York City. Szwed's interests include popular culture, ethnomusicology, jazz, dance, sound and recording, film, and improvisation and creolization in the arts. His books include Afro-American Anthropology, After Africa, Folk Songs and Their Makers, Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, Jazz 101, So What: The Life of Miles Davis, and Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture. Recently, he has written notes for the CD box set, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax (Rounder records, 2005) and the curriculum texts for NEA's "Jazz in the Schools" program. The box set has been nominated for two Grammy Awards for 2005--one of them for Szwed's liner notes. He has also written about music and performance for the Village Voice, Vibe, The Jazz Review, Wire, Time Out, The Boston Phoenix, and other publications, and is currently at work on a biography of Alan Lomax.

Photograph of Michael Taft.
Michael Taft

Michael Taft is the Head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Taft has a Ph.D. in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland (1977), a post-doctoral certificate in Folklore from Université Laval (1978), and a Masters in Library Science from the University of Alberta (1996). For over 25 years he conducted folklore fieldwork in Canada and the northern plains of the United States. During those years, he held research and teaching positions at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Saint Mary's University, Mount Saint Vincent University, University College of Cape Breton, University of Saskatchewan, and University of Regina. Since the early 1990s, Taft has become increasingly involved in ethnographic archiving. In 1993, he was a Laura Boulton Senior Research Fellow at the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University. Subsequently, he became curator of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, and the archivist for the Vermont Folklife Center. He was also the university archivist and head of special collections at the University of Northern British Columbia. Among his academic responsibilities, Taft has been the president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, the head of the Folklore Section of the MLA International Bibliography, indexer of the Journal of American Folklore, and managing editor of Culture & Tradition. Taft has published over 100 articles, book chapters, and reviews, as well as authoring, co-authoring, or editing a number of books. Among them is The Blues Lyric Formula (2006), Talkin' to Myself: Blues Lyrics, 1921-1942 (2005), "Them Days": Memories of a Prairie Valley (1993), The Bard of Edam: Walter Farewell, Homesteader Poet (1992), The Centennial Index: One Hundred Years of the Journal of American Folklore (1988), Inside These Greystone Walls: An Anecdotal History of the University of Saskatchewan (1984), Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance (1984), Discovering Saskatchewan Folklore: Three Case Studies (1983), Tall Tales of British Columbia (1983), and A Regional Discography of Newfoundland and Labrador,1904-1972 (1975).

Photograph of Jeff Todd Titon.
Jeff Titon

Jeff Todd Titon is a scholar, creative writer, photographer, filmmaker, and musician. He received the Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1971, where he studied with ethnomusicologist Alan Kagan. He has taught English, folklore, and ethnomusicology at Tufts and Brown Universities; since 1986 he has been professor of music and director of the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology at Brown. His theoretical interests have taken him into a continuing inquiry into the nature and possibilities of knowledge in folkloristic and ethnomusicological endeavors, particularly in the areas where oral history, autobiography, and fiction intersect. He has published numerous books and articles on American vernacular music, particularly blues, African-American chanted preaching, Appalachian fiddling, and religious folklife. He is known in ethnomusicology as an advocate for applied work, and as someone whose "friendship model" for doing fieldwork has profoundly influenced the discipline. His book, Worlds of Music, has gone through six editions (with translations into Italian and Chinese) since 1984. He served on the Folk Arts Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1981-1984, and from 1990-1995 he was editor of Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Publications from his field recordings include traditional fiddle and banjo music performed by National Heritage Award winner Clyde Davenport, as well as two CDs of lined-out hymnody by Old Regular Baptists, published by Smithsonian Folkways. As a filmmaker, his credits include the film Powerhouse for God (1986) and also Hap Collins of South Blue Hill, Maine (1989), a portrait of a folk poet, painter, and lobster fisherman. As a musician, he plays guitar, banjo and fiddle. He performed as a member of the Lazy Bill Lucas Blues Band, with an appearance at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. He repairs and restores violins and these days plays mainly old-time music, leading a string band at Brown. His most recent book is Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, a publication popular among old-time musicians.

Photograph of Bill Westerman.
Bill Westerman

Bill Westerman is Director at the Chicago Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial. The museum and memorial are projects of the Cambodian Association of Illinois. Westerman's previous experience includes periods as Director of the Program for Immigrant Traditional Artists at the International Institute of New Jersey (1994- 2003) and field researcher at the Philadelphia Folklore Project (1990-1994) Westerman’s research and writing have focused on Cambodian and Chinese immigrant and refugee history and on folk belief informing the Sanctuary movement to shelter Central American refugees in the United States.

Anna Lomax Wood is Executive Director of the Association for Cultural Equity. She has overseen the Alan Lomax Archive since 1996, implementing preservation and dissemination of Alan Lomax’s media documentation and scientific research. One of her main concerns has been to develop a viable system for returning recordings to the communities in which they were recorded. She also co-produces the Alan Lomax Collection, an ongoing series of releases on Rounder Records. Before attending college, she worked in the business world in various capacities. She earned a Ph.D. with distinction in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 1991, and taught briefly in Florida and Italy. Her principal research interest, which she pursued in Southern Italy, was in intercommunity micro-adaptation and variation as arising from historical organizational patterns based on occupation and social class, and their current manifestations in crisis situations. As a cultural anthropologist she has worked in diverse fields, including disaster research, children’s mental health planning and evaluation, and public folklore. In the latter field, she researched music and oral traditions among Italian, Spanish, and Greek immigrants to the United States and Canada, and also pursued projects in Italy and Spain. From 1975-1990 she served as presenter and producer of folk arts programs, exploring with non-English-speaking artists and ethnic communities various presentational modes and frameworks. In 1980, she was made a Knight in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Her publications, papers, and productions have included articles on voluntary aid in disasters, disasters and development, community variation and crisis recovery, the Calabrian villanella, and recontextualization of folklore. She co-authored a book with Joseph Sciorra on Sicilian-American poet Vincenzo Ancona, entitled Malidittu la linga/Damned Language (1990), and produced documentaries and recordings on Italian folk music. In the near future, Anna plans to pursue other interests, but will continue to look after Alan Lomax’s research and good name and support dissemination of archival documentation of oral traditions and their use in projects of cultural renewal.

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