Prof. Ray Allen
Ray Allen is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition he directs the American Studies Program and serves as a Senior Associate at the Institute for Studies in American Music. He teaches courses on American vernacular music with an emphasis on the music cultures of New York City.Professor Allen's research focuses on a variety of American folk and popular music, with a special interest in New York City music cultures. He is the author of Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) and co-editor of Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and most recently Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth Century American Music (University of Rochester Press, 2007). He is currently completing a manuscript on the urban folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
Oscar Brand
Oscar is a Folk Singer, Recording Artist, Songwriter, Guitarist, Bawdy Song Balladeer, Sea Chantey Performer, Radio Broadcaster, Television Program Host, Special Events Director, Emcee, Broadway Musical Composer, Playwright, Actor, Author, Storyteller, Musicologist, Historian, Children's Recording Artist, Curator of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Honorary Ph.D. He was also on the panel that created Sesame Street.His programs have been hailed as "Wonderful", "Exciting" and "Fantastic", but underneath he is a very ordinary and humble great folk singer. His programs have captivated audiences all over Canada, the United States, and Staten Island. They could be "Laughing America", wherein Americans laugh despite hard times, "Revolution through Rap", wherein we watch our music grow from colonial ballads through rock and roll, "Ballads and Ballots", American political songs...etc.
Anna Guthrie Canoni
Anna is Woody Guthrie's granddaughter, and is Events and Program Director of Woody Guthrie Publications: http://www.woodyguthrie.org
Rochelle Goldstein
Rochelle, 77 years old, was born and raised in the Bronx. In 1952, she married the well renowned folklorist and record producer, Kenny Goldstein. Together, they experienced the folk scene in Washington Square Park in the forties and fifties, as well as the many venues that produced much of the great folk music of that era. Kenny pursued a graduate degree in 1958, which relocated them to Philadelphia. He taught Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania for 31 years. Their experiences introduced them to many musicians in the United States and abroad. Rochelle's other interests include Yiddish folklore and folk dancing.
Dottie Miller Gutenkauf
Born Dorothy Miller in New York City in 1933, she graduated from Music & Art High School in 1950. In the 1940s and 1950s she was a regular at the Sunday folksinging sessions in New York’s Washington Square, and sang with Pete Seeger in the Good Neighbor Chorus. Now she sings with and writes lyrics for the Solidarity Singers of the NJ Industrial Union Council.After 10 years in the evening session at CCNY, she received a BA in Social Sciences in 1961, then sociology ABD at Southern Illinois University . She taught sociology at SUNY Cortland and was active in organizing the faculty union. . Writing and teaching are important to her. She’s also been involved with women’s issues and civil rights/civil liberties issues for most of her life.
Lori Holland
Lori Holland has been part of the New York folk music scene since the 1950s. Two of her albums, Scottish Folk Songs for Women (1958) and Irish Folk Songs for Women (1960) have recently been reissued as CDs by Smithsonian-Folkways. The original LPs are now rare collectors' items. In addition to being a fine traditional singer, Lori is also an accomplished songwriter whose songs have appeared in Sing Out magazine. Her signature song, Didn’t I Dance, has been recorded by many artists throughout the USA and Canada.George Pickow
Renowned Photographer George Pickow was at Camp Unity in New York in the early 1940s where he heard Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie jamming every night in a tiny cabin. He took up a career as a photographer, but still went to square dances; he met Jean Ritchie and put her on the front cover of a trucker's magazine. (They married in 1950.) In 1953 Alan Lomax, George Pickow, and Peter Kennedy directed the film Oss Oss Wee Oss showing the May Eve and May Day Festivals at Padstow, Cornwall. George went to the UK accompanieing Jean on her Fulbright scholarship collecting trip, photographing Seamus Ennis, the McPeakes, Leo Rowsome, Sarah Makem and others. In 1961 Alan Lomax and George Pickow directed Ballads, Blues, Bluegrass.
Jon Pickow
As a composer and arranger, Jonathan Pickow has contributed to numerous recordings, video sound tracks, radio programs, and industrials. His arrangements are in the repertoires of the Robert De Cormier Singers, The Düsing Singers, and folk singer Oscar Brand, among others. Mr. Pickow began a professional singing career at a very young age, appearing with his mother, Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie, at concerts and folk festivals throughout the country, including The Newport Folk Festival, The Philadelphia Folk Festival, Fox Hollow, and Canada’s Mariposa Festival. He has since produced and performed on many of Ms. Ritchie’s albums. As a soloist Mr. Pickow encompasses many styles, medieval to twentieth-century, to the traditional music of many cultures. He has toured domestically and internationally with Harry Belafonte, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Robert De Cormier Singers and The Norman Luboff Choir, and has performed with such conductors as Gunther Schuller, Roger Wagner, and André Previn.
Jean Ritchie
An outstanding songwriter, author and folklorist, Jean Ritchie has been a major figure in American folk music for more than thirty years. Her songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Linda Ronstadt, and many more. In concert, either solo or in tandem with her husband George Pickow's award-winning photographs, slides and films, Jean opens the door on the music of the Kentucky mountains.Miss Ritchie, 85, has been interweaving snippets of her own Appalachia-rooted compositions with those of centuries-old British and Celtic folk tunes ever since she picked up her first dulcimer — snitched her father’s instrument, to be precise — at age 5. She figures she has 500 songs in the brain bank, 600 if she counts newer ones she wrote on her own.
Tony Saletan
A fine singer and guitar & Banjo player, Tony has traveled around the world collecting songs and he is superb at sharing them with you. He has had several folk Music TV series on public stations, and has appeared on radio's "Prairie Home Companion", and TV's "Sesame Street." Tony has been invited to sing American Folk Songs in 24 countries of Asia including 4 repeated Asian tours and was honored by receiving a grant from the Fund for the Arts recognizing his contributions to the traditional arts and has many records issued on:Western ITV.
Roger Sprung
Born in Manhattan in 1930, Roger Sprung is part of a small New York-born fraternity of banjoists, unlike the horde that frail and hail from the Appalachian area. Sprung's roots in this music go into the buried depths of the 1940s and ‘50s folk music scene, playing banjo with the Shanty Boys, Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie and others. In 1950 he made his first trip to the mountains of North Carolina, and soon returned to develop an original style that has become to be known as progressive bluegrass. His first successful recordings were in a progressive acoustic trio with Eric Darling and Bob Carey in 1953. His radically versatile repertoire influenced many banjo players including virtuoso Bela Fleck. Sprung has taught banjo and related instruments, invented innovative modifications of the banjo, and continues to perform, teaming up with Hal Wylie for the last 25 years. Roger's three classic Progressive Bluegrass LPs are now available as CDs from Smithsonian Folkways along with later recordings.
Dr. Anna Lomax Wood
Anna L. Wood has served as Executive Director of the Association for Cultural Equity since 1996, when she stepped in to preserve her father’s work. With a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University, she has done research on cultural history and inter-community variation; disaster recovery and reconstruction; the local impact of NGO disaster aid and rural industrialization programs; risk factors for children in poverty; and settings for children’s mental health programs. Wood was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1980), and a Grammy as producer of the Best Historical Recording of 2005: Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. The organizational website is: http://www.culturalequity.org/index.jsp