Influential Folk Musicians

Influential Musicians
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Influential Folk Performers
(Click on individual Musician's Biography section to visit Musician's Home Page)

Throughout the history of music individual performers have had a major impact on the music scene. These influential/notable musicians have left their mark by expanding the envelope of their respective genres, either through technical proficiency, experimentation/exploration, or persona. The following list of notable/influential folk musicians and performers is by no means complete. The performers listed are those that readily came to mind, and any additions to the list can be sent using the link at the bottom of the page. The individual home pages for the musicians listed can be reached by clicking on their name in the bio section.

Ani Defranco

Ani DiFranco - born Angela Maria DiFranco on September 23, 1970, is a Grammy Award-winning singer, guitarist, and songwriter. She is known as a prolific artist, (having released over twenty albums), and is widely celebrated as a feminist icon. Ani DiFranco has written hundreds of songs, played thousands of shows, captured the imaginations of legions of followers, and jammed with folkies, orchestras, rappers, rock and roll hall-of-famers, jazz musicians, poets, pop superstars, storytellers and a martial arts legend. She’s “fixed up a few old buildings” and minimized her carbon footprint before it was trendy – from installing a geothermal heating and cooling system in the renovated church that her label calls home to using organic inks on all the t-shirts she sells. But nothing she’s done in her 18-year career has garnered more attention than a business decision.
Since Ani bucked the major label system in the early-‘90s, opting to release her music on her own terms, the self-described Little Folksinger has been the subject of all kinds of hyperbole. She’s been called “fiercely independent” (Rolling Stone), “inspirational” (All Music Guide), “the ultimate do-it-yourself songwriter” (The New York Times), etc. As the cracks in the music industry get larger and more big-name artists follow Ani’s lead – Radiohead, Madonna and Nine Inch Nails among them – maybe people will just start calling her “smart.”

Archie Roach - born 1956, in Mooroopna, Victoria, is an Australian musician. A singer, songwriter and guitarist, he survived a turbulent upbringing to develop into a powerful voice for indigenous Australians, a storyteller in the tradition of his ancestors, and a nationally popular and respected artist.Kev Carmody excepted, no singer-songwriter in the country comes within cooee of Archie Roach in expressing the suffering of Aboriginal Australia. Journey pauses for reflection on past injustice while continuing the uphill path towards reconciliation. The author of seminal songs such as Took The Children Away tacitly acknowledges Afro-American struggles of yore, encasing his songs in classic blues, country and spiritual coverings.

Bert Jansch - born 3 November 1943, is a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and, in the 1960s, he was heavily influenced by the guitarist Davey Graham and folk singers such as Anne Briggs. He is best known as an innovative and accomplished acoustic guitarist but is also a singer and songwriter. He has recorded at least 25 albums and has toured extensively starting in the 1960s and continuing into the 21st century. Bert began performing his unique synthesis of folk, blues and jazz on the folk club scene of the early 1960s, having hitch-hiked to London from his hometown of Edinburgh. His first album, Bert Jansch, (played on a borrowed guitar and recorded on a reel-to-reel tape deck) was legendarily sold to the Transatlantic label for £100 (approx $148). On its release in April 1965 Bert Jansch caused a sensation for its innovative guitar technique and powerful songs and it has been phenomenally influential to this day, cited by legions of guitar players (famous and otherwise) as a major inspiration. Today Bert is still as active, innovative and influential as ever. In a live setting, Bert's performances are still a rare opportunity to see one of the British music scene's true legends play. His understated, low key approach eschews hollow show business routines, and the audience is treated to a guitar playing master class and an impressive catalogue of some of the most haunting songs in the British canon.

Bill Spence - Born: August 1940, Iowa City, Iowa. Graduated with a BA in Communications 1962 University of Iowa. Army Security Agency, US Army 1962 - 1965. State University of New York at Albany, Television, Audio and Graphic Design until his retirement in 1998. Bill comes by his interest in Celtic music honestly, having Scottish, Irish and Scandinavian parents and grandparents. He lives in Voorheesville, NY with his wife "Andy" and has one daughter, Hannah, a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Oberlin, OH. Thirty-eight years later Fennig's All-Star String Band still plays for contra dances and occasional weddings, festivals, concerts, and community events.

Bill Staines

Bill Staines - For over thirty five years, Bill has traveled back and forth across North America, singing his songs and delighting audiences at festivals, folksong societies, colleges, concerts, clubs and coffeehouses. A New England native, Bill became involved with the Boston- Cambridge folk scene in the early 1960's and, for a time, emceed the Sunday hootenanny at the renowned Club 47 in Cambridge. Bill quickly became a popular performer in the Boston area. In 1971, after one of his performances, a reviewer for The Phoenix stated that Bill was "simply Boston's best performer." A decade later, both in 1980 and 1981, the annual Reader's Poll of The Boston Globe selected him as a favorite performer. In 1991 , Bill entered his forth decade as a folk performer with an international reputation as an artist.

Billy Bragg - Stephen William Bragg, born 20 December 1957 in Essex, England, is better known as Billy Bragg. An English musician who blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs. His lyrics mostly deal with political or romantic themes. His music career has lasted more than 30 years, and he has collaborated with Johnny Marr, Leon Rosselson, members of R.E.M., Michelle Shocked, Less Than Jake, Kirsty MacColl, and Wilco. He performed with Kate Nash at the 2008 NME awards. Bragg often plays and speaks at the Tolpuddle Martyrs festival. Bragg Close, in Dagenham, Greater London, is named in his honour. He now lives in Dorset.

Bill Morrissey - Bill Morrissey's astute lyrical gifts and graceful, understated melodies have put him on festival stages across the world; into theatres, concert halls, and coffeehouses; garnered him critical acclaim from magazines, authors, and music peers; and have earned him two Grammy nominations. Bill Morrissey has created as impressive a body of work as any songwriter today, a collection of finely-honed songs that match his economy of lyric and melody with a writer’s gift for storytelling. His empathetic knack for capturing the harshness and small sadness of the characters in his songs is tempered by his wry sense of humor, such that many of his songs leave the listener with a smile. Over the course of his long career, two of Bill Morrissey's ten albums have received Grammy nominations and several have earned 4-star reviews in Rolling Stone as well as equal accolades in nearly every other major national publication. Stephen Holden, for the New York Times, wrote, "Mr. Morrissey's songs have the force of poetry...a terseness, precision of detail and a tone of laconic understatement that relate his lyrics to the fiction of writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford." It is not surprising that he is also the author of the novel "Edson" (Random House/Alfred A. Knopf 1996) and the recently completed "Imaginary Runner." On stage, Bill mixes the seriousness and urgency of his songs with a wry, acerbic wit. His often improvised and deadpan monologues and introductions provide a perfect balance to his live shows.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan - born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, is an American singer-songwriter, author, poet, and painter, who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album chart at number one, and that same year was named Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine. Dylan's early lyrics incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has explored many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and even jazz and swing. Dylan performs with the guitar, piano and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the "Never Ending Tour". Although his accomplishments as performer and recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally regarded as his greatest contribution. Throughout his career, Dylan has won many awards for his songwriting, performing, and recording. His records have earned Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards, and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2008, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.

Bruce Cockburn - Bruce Douglas Cockburn, ,born May 27, 1945, is a Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter. He has recorded an immense volume of work, his 29th album being released in summer 2006, and has written songs in styles ranging from folk to jazz-influenced rock to rock and roll. While Cockburn had been popular in Canada for years, he did not make a splash in the United States until 1979, with the release of the album Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws, still a landmark of acoustic-based pop featuring intricate lyrics, great sonics, and startling guitar work. Wondering Where the Lions Are, the first single from that album, reached #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US in June 1980, and earned Cockburn an appearance on NBC's hit TV show Saturday Night Live. Through the 1980s Cockburn's songwriting became first more urban, later more global, and then, ultimately and most famously, more politicized: he became heavily involved with progressive causes.

Bruce (Utah) Phillips - Bruce "Utah" Duncan Phillips, (May 15, 1935 – May 23, 2008), was a labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet and the "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest". He described the struggles of labor unions and the power of direct action, self-identifying as an anarchist. He often promoted the Industrial Workers of the World in his music, actions, and words. His nickname comes from when he was in the army. No one had ever met anyone else from Utah so they called him Utah.
Phillips met folk singer Rosalie Sorrels in the early 1950s, and remained a close friend of hers. It was Sorrels who started playing the songs that Phillips wrote, and through her his music began to spread. After leaving Utah in the late 1960s, he went to Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was befriended by the folk community at the Caffé Lena coffee house, where he became a staple performer throughout that decade.
Phillips was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies). His view of unions and politics were shaped by his parents, especially his Mom who was a labor organizer for the CIO. But Phillips was more of an Christian anarchist and a pacifist, so found the modern-day Wobblies to be the perfect fit for him, an iconoclast and artist. In recent years, perhaps no single person did more to spread the Wobbly gospel than Phillips, whose countless concerts were, in effect, organizing meetings for the cause of labor, unions, anarchism, pacifism, and the Wobblies. He was a tremendous interpreter of classic Wobbly tunes including "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," "Preacher and the Slave," and "Bread and Roses."

Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield was a short-lived but influential folk rock group that served as a springboard for the careers of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Jim Messina and is most famous for the song "For What It's Worth". After its formation in April 1966, a series of disruptions, including internal bickering, as well as the pressure of working in the music industry, resulted in constant changes in the group's lineup — and ultimately culminated in the group's disbanding after roughly 25 months. Buffalo Springfield released a total of three albums but also left a legacy that includes many demo recordings, studio outtakes, and live recordings.

Buffy Saint Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie - born Beverly Sainte-Marie, February 20, 1941, is an Academy Award-winning Canadian First Nations musician, composer, visual artist, pacifist,educator and social activist. Buffy Sainte-Marie was a graduating college senior in 1962 and hit the ground running in the early the Sixties, after the beatniks and before the hippies. All alone she toured North America's colleges, reservations and concert halls, meeting both huge acclaim and huge misperception from audiences and record companies who expected Pocahontas in fringes, and instead were both entertained and educated with their initial dose of Native American reality in the first person. By age 24, Buffy Sainte-Marie had appeared all over Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia, receiving honors, medals and awards which continue to this day. Her song "Until It's Time for You to Go" was recorded by Elvis and Barbra and Cher, and her "Universal Soldier" became the anthem of the peace movement. For her very first album she was voted Billboard's Best New Artist.
She disappeared suddenly from the mainstream American airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson years. As part of a blacklist which affected Eartha Kitt, Taj Mahal and a host of other outspoken performers, her name was included on White House stationery as among those whose music "deserved to be suppressed". In Indian country and abroad, however, her fame only grew. She continued to appear at countless grassroots concerts, AIM events and other activist benefits. She made 17 albums of her music, three of her own television specials, spent five years on Sesame Street, scored movies, helped to found Canada's 'Music of Aboriginal Canada' JUNO category, raised a son, earned a Ph.D. in Fine Arts, taught Digital Music as adjunct professor at several colleges, and won an Academy Award Oscar for the song "Up Where We Belong".

Burl Ives - Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives, June 14,1909 – April 14,1995, was an Academy Award winning American actor, writer and acclaimed folk music singer. The prominent music critic John Rockwell has been quoted in the New York Times as saying that "Ives's voice... had the sheen and finesse of opera without its latter-day Puccinian vulgarities and without the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel in expressive impact without being genteel in social conformity. And it moved people."
Ives was identified in the infamous 1950 pamphlet Red Channels as an entertainer with supposed Communist ties. In 1952, he cooperated with the House Unamerican Activities Committee and named fellow folk singer Pete Seeger and others as possible Communists. His cooperation with the HUAC ended his blacklisting, allowing him to continue with his movie acting. It also led to a bitter rift between Ives and many folk singers, including Seeger, who felt that Ives had betrayed them and the cause of cultural and political freedom in order to save his own career. Forty-one years later, Ives and Seeger were reunited in a benefit concert in New York City; they sang "Blue Tail Fly" together.

Cat Stevens - Born Steven Demetre Georgiou, the son of a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner and Swedish mother, he grew up in a flat above the family shop in London’s theatre district, situated at the northernmost junction of Shaftesbury Avenue and New Oxford Street, near the heart of the West End. The back streets and alleyways of this cosmopolitan district became Steven’s concrete playground and a place of learning. Full of bright lights, famous theatres and cinemas, strip clubs and musical instrument stores, this busy part of the city throbbed with excitement and entertainment. Early on, Steven developed a natural love for art and music. At 15, he managed to get his father to buy him a guitar. From 1970 to 1974 he recorded and released the albums that would establish him as a leading singer-songwriter of his generation. His next major album, Tea for the Tillerman, from winter 1970, went gold in the U.S. with such songs as “Wild World,” “Hard Headed Woman,” “Where Do the Children Play” and “Father & Son,” which re-orbited as a massive hit in the ‘90s. After a near death experience while swimming, Cat retreated from the music business and embraced Islam in 1977, changing his name to Yusuf Islam.

Cathy Fink -born August 9, 1953, and Marcy Marxer born February 25, 1956, perform together as a folk music duo. They have been musical partners for more than 20 years. Over those years, they released several albums for both children and adults, won two Grammy Awards, produced records for artists ranging from Tom Paxton to Patsy Montana, wrote more than 200 songs and toured extensively.
Fink was born in Maryland, but began her musical career in Canada in the early 1970s, busking and playing folk music in coffeehouses. A singer, guitarist, banjo player and yodeler, she made her recording debut in 1975 with Duck Donald, with whom she toured for five years and recorded three albums. Marxer grew up in Swartz Creek, Michigan and learned to play guitar, mandolin, hammered dulcimer and button accordion while still in high school. She went to work for General Motors but continued to play at every opportunity. In 1978, after receiving theater training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Ringling Brothers Clown School, she devoted herself to music full time. The two met in 1980 at the Toronto Folk Festival. By 1983 they had begun writing songs together and appearing on each other's albums. Soon after, they began performing together, often in children's concerts. In 1989, they released a self-titled album, and the partnership became complete.
In the years since, the duo has released a number of albums, including Nobody Else Like Me, A Voice in the Wind and Changing Channels. Their CD Postcards won a Grammy nomination in 2003 for "Best Traditional Folk Album." After several Grammy nominations, they captured their first Grammy Award in 2004 for their children's album Bon Appetit and won their second in 2005 as producers and artists for cELLAbration: A Tribute to Ella Jenkins. Individually and together, they've produced more than a dozen albums for other artists, served as studio musicians, and created a series of instructional materials and videos ranging from guitar and ukulele for kids to how to sing harmony. They've performed at the White House Easter Egg Roll, appeared on National Public Radio, won several songwriting awards and have been acknowledged for their work with children in the Congressional Record.

Christine Lavin

Christine Lavin - born January 2, 1952, is a New York City-based singer, songwriter, and promoter of contemporary folk music. She has recorded numerous solo albums, and has also recorded with other female folk artists under the name Four Bitchin' Babes. She has also put together several compilation albums of contemporary folk artists, including On a Winter's Night. She is known for her sense of humor, which is expressed in both her music and her onstage performances. Many of her songs alternate between emotional reflections on romance and outright comedy. Two of her more famous songs include "Sensitive New Age Guys" and "Bald Headed Men".
In her youth, Lavin was a cheerleader in Geneva, New York and she still has impressive baton-twirling skills; she often ends a concert by twirling a glow-in-the-dark baton with the house lights turned off as she leaves the stage. Lavin worked at Caffe Lena in Saratoga, New York until Dave Van Ronk convinced her to move to New York City and make a career as a singer-songwriter. She followed his advice and accepted his offer of guitar lessons. She has lived in the City ever since. Lavin was the original host of "Sunday Breakfast" on WFUV in New York City and was a founding member of the Four Bitchin' Babes when they were formed in 1990.

The Corrs - The Corrs are a Celtic folk rock group from Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland. The group consists of the Corr siblings: Andrea (vocals, tin whistle); Sharon (violin, vocals); Caroline (drums, percussion, bodhrán, vocals); and Jim (guitar, keyboards, vocals). The Corrs came to international prominence with their performance at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. Since then, they have released five studio albums and numerous singles, which have reached platinum in many countries. Talk on Corners, their most successful album to date, reached multi-platinum status in Australia and the UK. The Corrs have been actively involved in philanthropic activities. They have performed in numerous charity concerts such as the Prince's Trust in 2004 and Live 8 alongside Bono in 2005. The same year, they were awarded honorary MBEs for their contributions to music and charity.

CSN&Y - Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN) is a folk rock/rock supergroup made up of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, also known as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) when joined by occasional fourth member Neil Young. They are noted for their intricate vocal harmonies, often tumultuous interpersonal relationships, political activism, and lasting influence on music and culture. Initially formed by the trio of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the genesis of the group lies in two 1960s rock bands, The Byrds and The Hollies, and the demise of a third, Buffalo Springfield. Friction existed between David Crosby and his bandmates in the Byrds, and he was dismissed from the Byrds in the fall of 1967. By early 1968, Buffalo Springfield had also disintegrated over personal issues, and after aiding in putting together the band’s final album, Stephen Stills found himself unemployed by the summer. He and Crosby began meeting informally and jamming, the results of one encounter in Florida on Crosby’s schooner being the song “Wooden Ships,” composed in collaboration with another guest, Paul Kantner. Graham Nash had been introduced to Crosby when the Byrds had toured the UK in 1966, and when the Hollies ventured to California in 1968, Nash resumed his acquaintance with Crosby. At a party in February 1969 at Cass Elliot's house, Nash asked Stills and Crosby to repeat their performance of a new song by Stills, “You Don't Have To Cry,” with Nash improvising a second harmony part. The vocals jelled, and the three realized that they had a unique vocal chemistry.

David Bromberg - Born in Philadelphia on September 19, 1945. Bromberg grew up in Tarrytown, New York. Inspired by the music of Pete Seeger and the Weavers, among others, he began studying the guitar at age 13. After graduating from Tarrytown High School, he enrolled at Columbia University intent on a career as a musicologist.
Drawn to Greenwich Village's flourishing coffeehouse folk music scene in the mid-1960’s, Bromberg opted for performance combined with his studies; he left school in the middle of his second year, however, to devote full time to his music. Shortly thereafter, his extraordinary guitar picking and exceptional stylistic range brought him to the attention of many other musicians: Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, John Hurt, the Reverend Gary Davis, Tom Paxton, and Chubby Checker are only a few of the notables who sought Bromberg out as a back-up artist for recording. In all he has played as a sideman on over 100 albums. A singular performer/writer/arranger, Bromberg’s remarkable musical versatility and innovative resourcefulness have earned vast critical and popular acclaim. He is also impossible to classify: As one critic perceptively wrote, “David Bromberg fits no pigeonholes. He is part of everything contemporarily musical. He is a product of blues, country, jazz, folk, and classical music. From his early success as a guitar virtuoso, Mr. Bromberg has developed into a brilliant entertainer.”

Dave Van Ronk - Born on June 30, 1936, Van Ronk had dropped out of high school at the age of 15. He had already performed as part of a barbershop quartet, but his life had truly been altered once he heard a recording of the old-time standard, "Stackolee", sung by Memphis Bluesman, Furry Lewis. Van Ronk was intrigued by this sound and began collecting various recordings of African-American music with a passion. After serving a short stint with the Merchant Marines, Van Ronk started performing professionally in the coffee houses and cafes in New York's Greenwich Village in 1956. He had a vast repertoire by this time and his shows became the role model for many future musicians, including Odena, Christine Lavin, Tom Paxton, and especially a young songwriter who had recently arrived from Minnesota going by the name of Bob Dylan.
Over 40 years, Dave Van Ronk released 20 albums under his name, which featured covers of songs by artists mostly unknown to white listeners in the dawn of his career, people like, Bukka White, Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Gary Davis and Blind Lemon Jefferson. He also continued to perform steadily during this time, making appearances around the world and featured as a headliner at many festivals. His last performance took place on October 22, 2001 in Adelphi, Maryland.
Van Ronk had been diagnosed with colon cancer shortly before this final appearance. He underwent surgery to ease his suffering on November 5th of that same year, but the cancer was too advanced and treatments continued, while his profession was placed on hiatus. Dave Van Ronk died on February 10, 2002, at the age of 65 in the New York University Medical Center in Manhattan, from complications arising from his illness.

Dropkick Murphys - Dropkick Murphys formed in 1996 in Boston, MA. The band was originally just a bunch of friends looking to play music for fun. They started playing in the basement of a friend’s barbershop and the goal was to blend the musical influences they had grown up with (Punk Rock, Irish Folk, Rock, and Hardcore) into one loud, raucous, chaotic, and often out of tune mix that they could call their own. he bands’ main goal is to play music that creates an all for one, one for all environment where everyone is encouraged to participate, sing along, and hopefully have a good time. In the true spirit of punk rock we view the band and the audience as one in the same; in other words our stage and our microphone are yours.

Eric Bogle - born 23 September 1944 in Peebles, Scotland, is a folk singer-songwriter. He emigrated to Australia in 1969 and currently resides near Adelaide, South Australia. Several of his most famous songs tell of the futility or loss of war. Prominent among these is "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda", written in 1972. The lyrics tell of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) experience fighting in the Battle of Gallipoli. Bogle's songs cover a wide range of subjects and themes, including comedic songs , one of Australia's eminent singer/songwriters, Eric Bogle has been sharing his unique Scotsman-goes-down-under view since the late-'70s.

Fairport Convention - played its first concert in a church hall in May 1967. Based in suburban north London, the group had coalesced around bass guitarist Ashley 'Tyger' Hutchings. The youngsters 'convened' for rehearsals at a house named Fairport, the family home of rhythm guitarist Simon Nicol. Thus was born the name of a band that has endured for nearly four decades. As well as Hutchings and Nicol, there was lead guitarist Richard Thompson and Shaun Frater on drums. However, that initial line-up only played the one gig. A young drummer, Martin Lamble, was in the church hall audience and he convinced the band that he could do a better job than the incumbent. It was the first of the bewildering flurry of line-up changes that characterised Fairport's first fifteen years. Fairport soon augmented its line-up with a female singer, Judy Dyble, which set it apart from the dozens of other bands springing up from the fast-moving youth culture of that summer. Fairport found no shortage of work and was soon a regular act at underground venues such as The Electric Garden, Middle Earth and UFO.
The band had only been playing a few months when they caught the ear of Joe Boyd who secured them a contract with Island Records. Boyd suggested they augment the line-up with another male vocalist and so Iain Matthews joined the band and the first album, Fairport Convention, came out before the end of 1967. At this early stage, Fairport looked to America for material and inspiration. "The two lead vocalist approach appealed to us," Matthews recalls. "and because of our name and onstage presence, lots of people thought we were American, and we were not about to attempt to dispel that presumption." This led to the band being dubbed 'the British Jefferson Airplane'.

Ferron Ferron - Ferron, born Debby Foisy on June 2, 1952, is a Canadian folk singer/songwriter and poet. In addition to being one of Canada's most famous influential folk musicians, she is one of the most influential writers and performers of women's music, and an important influence on later musicians such as Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls.
"Ferron … is a real salt of the earth singer who approaches her art with both sleeves rolled up, ready to dive in. She walks her talk with heart exposed and performs with a courage and commitment that few other artists ever muster. The songs don't sound composed and sung as much as they feel wrung from the sweat and toil of hard fought experience. In Ferron's world, the contents of her songs appear as if they're lived out on the canvas of her life and not just inside the confines of her art…when she sings, no one can miss the gravity and weight inferred by her commanding alto voice" (Heselgrave 2008).

Flogging Molly - is a seven-piece Irish American Celtic punk band that formed in Los Angeles, California and is currently signed to SideOneDummy Records. heir music ranges from boisterous celtic punk, like the pirate-themed "Salty Dog", "Cruel Mistress", and "Seven Deadly Sins", or the defiant "What's Left of the Flag", "Drunken Lullabies", and "Rebels of the Sacred Heart" to more sombre songs like "Far Away Boys", "The Son Never Shines (On Closed Doors)", and "Float." Lyrics typically touch on subjects such as Ireland and its history, drinking, politics, love, and include several references to the Roman Catholic Church. Founded in Los Angeles in 1997 by the expatriate King, Flogging Molly got its start and its name from a local bar called Molly Malone's where the band played and grew and laid down the blueprint for its eventual success. As every member of Flogging Molly will emphatically explain, there were no predetermined expectations for the band's sound. From night to night playing to a packed house at Molly Malone's, the sound evolved organically. Traditional Celtic instruments like violin, mandolin and accordion blended seamlessly with grinding guitars and pounding drums. Without consciously attempting it, Flogging Molly merged the music of King's childhood in Dublin with the music of his adulthood in L.A.

Garnet Rogers - born May 1955, is a Canadian folk musician, singer, songwriter and composer. He began his professional career working with his brother, folk musician Stan Rogers, and arranging Stan's music. Since Stan Rogers' death in 1983, Garnet Rogers has pursued his own career. While his brother's style of writing was more traditional and often based on Canadian Maritime styles, Garnet's style is more modern, utilizing influences from Blues, Rock, Country/Bluegrass, and Classical.
Garnet Rogers has established himself as 'One of the major talents of our time". Hailed by the Boston Globe as a "charismatic performer and singer", Garnet is a man with a powerful physical presence - close to six and a half feet tall - with a voice to match. With his "smooth, dark baritone", his incredible range, and thoughtful, dramatic phrasing, Garnet is widely considered by fans and critics alike to be one of the finest singers anywhere. His music, like the man himself, is literate, passionate, highly sensitive, and deeply purposeful.

Gordon Lightfoot - born November 17, 1938, Ontario, Canada, Lightfoot moved to Los Angeles during the 50s where he studied at Hollywood's Westlake College of Music. Having pursued a short-lived career composing jingles for television, the singer began recording demos of his own compositions which, by 1960, owed a considerable debt to folk singers Pete Seeger and Bob Gibson. Lightfoot then returned to Canada and began performing in Toronto's Yorkville coffeehouses. His work was championed by several acts, notably Ian And Sylvia and Peter, Paul And Mary. Both recorded the enduring 'Early Morning Rain', which has since become a standard, while the latter group also enjoyed a hit with his 'For Lovin' Me'. Other successful compositions included 'Ribbon Of Darkness', which Marty Robbins took to the top of the US country chart, while such renowned artists as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis have all covered Lightfoot's songs. Gordon began performing while still a child; doing vocal arrangements, demonstration records, and commercial jingles in Los Angeles while studying orchestration at Westlake College before performing in coffee houses in eastern Canada an New York in the late '50s early'60s, and signing first recording contract in1966.
An eloquent composer, Gordon Lightfoot pens contemporary ballads that could easily be the envy of historic bards entrusted to record the world around them in all its beauty, harshness, and poignancy. Said Jack Batten, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Lightfoot fills the role of "journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller, and folksy recollector of bygone days." From love songs to depictions of Canadian history and wilderness, Lightfoot's songs, many of which became virtual overnight standards ("If You Could Read My Mind," "Sundown," "Carefree Highway"), touch the listener on more levels and in more ways than most musicians could ever dream of.

Greg Brown - born July 2, 1949, is a folk musician from Fairfield, IA, USA. His "Iowa Waltz" was unsuccessfully proposed to replace the state song of Iowa. Greg Brown's mother played electric guitar, his grandfather played banjo, and his father was a Holy Roller preacher in the Hacklebarney section of Iowa, where the Gospel and music are a way of life. Brown's first professional singing job came at age 18 in New York City, running hootenannies at the legendary Gerdes Folk City. After a year, Brown moved west to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where he was a ghostwriter for Buck Ram, founder of the Platters. Tired of the fast-paced life, Brown traveled with a band for a few years, and even quit playing for a while before he moved back to Iowa and began writing songs and playing in midwestern clubs and coffeehouses. Brown's songwriting has been lauded by many, and his songs have been performed by Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana, Michael Johnson, Shawn Colvin, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. He has also recorded more than a dozen albums.

Holly Near - born June 6, 1949 in Ukiah, California, is an American singer-songwriter, teacher and social change activist. Holly Near's professional career began in 1969 with a part on the television show, The Mod Squad, which was followed by appearances in other shows, such as All in the Family and The Partridge Family, as well as in films like Slaughterhouse-Five and Minnie and Moskowitz. She was briefly a member of the musical comedy troupe, "First National Nothing", and appeared on the troupe's only album, If You Sit Real Still and Hold My Hand, You Will Hear Absolutely Nothing (Columbia Records - LP C 30006).
   In 1970, Near was a cast member of the Broadway musical, Hair. Following the Kent State shootings in May of that year, the entire cast staged a silent vigil in protest. The song, "It Could Have Been Me" (which was released on A Live Album, 1974), was her heartfelt response to the shootings. In 1971, she joined the FTA (Free The Army) Tour, an anti-Vietnam War road show of music, comedy and plays, organized by antiwar activist Fred Gardner and actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
   During her long career in folk and protest music, Holly Near has worked with a wide array of musicians, including Ronnie Gilbert, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Mercedes Sosa, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Meg (Shambhavi) Christian, Cris Williamson, Linda Tillery, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Harry Belafonte, and many others, as well as the Chilean exile group, Inti-Illimani.
   In 1972, Near founded an independent record label called Redwood Records (now defunct) to produce and promote music by "politically conscious artists from around the world".
   "I do not separate my music from my heart nor do I separate my ideas from my daily life. I open my self up to learning as much as I can about humanity and this mysterious life experience, but I do not relate to political work as series of "causes". Moment by moment, I integrate what I learn into my personal life, personalizing my politics. It is from this personal place that I write my songs." Holly Near.

Indigo Girls - are an American folk rock duo, consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. They got their start in Atlanta as a regular act at The Little 5 Points Pub and were tangentially part of the Athens, Georgia college rock scene that included The B-52's, Pylon, R.E.M., The Georgia Satellites, and Love Tractor. The two women got to know each other as students at Laurel Ridge Elementary School in DeKalb County, Georgia just outside of Decatur, Georgia, but were not friends because Emily was a grade ahead of Amy. While attending Shamrock High School, they grew closer, and started performing together, first as the B-Band and then as Saliers and Ray. Saliers graduated and began attending Tulane University. A year later, Ray graduated and began at Vanderbilt University. Homesick, both returned to Georgia and transferred to Emory University. By 1985, they had begun performing together again, this time as the Indigo Girls. Twenty years after they began releasing records as Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have politely declined the opportunity to mellow with age. You could just say it's just not in their constitution. Devoted environmental and social justice activists and lifelong music-industry mavericks, the Girls have spent their entire career pushing boundaries on a variety of fronts.

James Taylor

James Taylor - James Vernon Taylor, born March 12, 1948, is a Grammy Award winning American singer-songwriter and guitarist born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Carrboro, North Carolina. Taylor's career began in the mid-1960s, but he found his audience in the early 1970s, singing sensitive and gentle songs. Over the course of his long career, James Taylor has earned 40 gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards and 5 Grammy Awards for a catalog running from 1970's Sweet Baby James to his Grammy Award-winning efforts Hourglass (1997) and October Road (2002). Taylor's first Greatest Hits album earned him the RIAA's elite Diamond Award, given for sales in excess of 10 million units in the United States. For his accomplishments, James was honored with the 1998 Century Award, Billboard magazine's highest accolade, bestowed for distinguished creative achievement.

Janis Ian - born Janis Eddy Fink, April 7, 1951, is a Grammy Award-winning American songwriter, singer, multi-instrumental musician, columnist, and science fiction fan-turned-author. She had a highly successful singing career in the 1960s and 1970s, and has continued recording into the 21st century. At the age of fifteen, Ian wrote and sang her first hit single, "Society's Child", about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl's mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers; the girl ultimately decides to end the relationship, claiming the societal norms of the day have left her no other choice. Her most successful single was "At Seventeen," released in 1975, a bittersweet commentary on adolescent cruelty and teenage angst, as reflected upon from the maturity of adulthood. "At Seventeen" was a smash, receiving tremendous acclaim from critics and record buyers alike and it charted at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. It even won the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance - Female beating out the likes of Linda Ronstadt who was nominated for the classic Heart Like A Wheel album, Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy. Ian performed "At Seventeen" as a musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975.

Jim Croce - James Joseph Croce, (January 10, 1943 – September 20, 1973), popularly known as Jim Croce, was an American singer-songwriter. Croce scored a handful of hit songs in the first of half of the '70s, but died in an airplane crash just as he was beginning to capitalize on his success. Jim's musical career started when he was five years old, learning to play "Lady of Spain" on the accordion. He says, "I was the original underachiever. I'd shake that thing and smile, but I was sort of a late bloomer." He didn't really take music too seriously until 1964, while he was attending Villanova College in Pennsylvania. There he formed various bands, doing fraternity parties and playing "anything that the people wanted to hear: blues, rock, acapella, railroad music...anything." One of those bands was chosen for a foreign exchange tour of Africa and the Middle East. His first album, You Don't Mess Around With Jim, was an instant success. Jim immediately became a top bill club and concert performer and the title song and "Operator" pulled from the album, were both highly successful singles. The friendliness and sincerity of Jim's performances have endeared him to a wide variety of audiences.

Jimmie Rodgers - born on September 8, 1897 in Meridian, Mississippi, the youngest of three sons. His mother died when he was a very young boy, and Rodgers spent the next few years living with various relatives in southeast Mississippi and southwest Alabama. He eventually returned home to live with his father, Aaron Rodgers, a Maintenance of Way Foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, who had settled with a new wife in Meridian. Jimmie's affinity for entertaining came at an early age, and the lure of the road was irresistible to him. By age 13, he had twice organized and begun traveling shows, only to be brought home by his father. In 1924, at the age of 27, jimmi1 contracted tuberculosis, and the paradox of this development is bittersweet. The disease temporarily ended his railroad career, but, at the same time, gave him the chance to get back to his first love, entertainment. He organized a traveling road show and performed across the southeast. On Wednesday, August 4, jimmi1 Rodgers completed his first session for Victor. It lasted from 2:00 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. and yielded two songs: "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" and "The Soldier's Sweetheart." For the test recordings, Rodgers received $100. In the next few years, Rodgers was very busy. He did a movie short, The Singing Brakeman, and made various recordings across the country. He toured with humorist Will Rogers as part of a Red Cross tour across the Midwest. Rodgers' next to last recordings were made in August of 1932 in Camden and it was clear that TB was getting the better of him. He had given up touring by that time but did have a weekly radio show in San Antonio, Texas, where he'd relocated when "T for Texas" became a hit. In May of 1933, Rodgers traveled to New York City for a group of sessions beginning May 17. He started these sessions recording alone and completed four songs on the first take. But there was no question that Rodgers was running out of track. When he returned to the studio after a day's rest, he had to record sitting down and soon retreated to his hotel in hopes of regaining enough energy to finish the songs he'd been rehearsing. The recording engineer hired two session musicians to help Rodgers when he came back to the studio a few days later. Together, they recorded a few songs, including "Mississippi Delta Blues." For his last song of the session, however, Rodgers chose to perform alone, and as a matching bookend to his career, recorded "Years Ago" by himself, finishing as he'd started years earlier, just a man and his instrument. Within 36 hours, "The Father of Country Music" was dead.

Joan Baez - In the summer of 1958, Joan Chandos Baez, a 17-year old high school graduate and moved with her family - her parents Albert and Joan, older sister Pauline and younger sister Mimi - from Palo Alto to Boston. They drove cross-country with the Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley" all over the radio, a guilty pleasure of Joan's. She was an entering freshman at Boston University School Of Drama, where she was surrounded by a musical group of friends who shared a passion for folk music. Joan's natural vibrato lent a taut, nervous tension to everything she sang. Yet even as an 18-year old, introduced onstage at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, her repertoire reflected a different sensibility from her peers. Among the songs she introduced on her earliest albums that would find their ways into the repertoire of 60's rock stalwarts were "House Of the Rising Sun" (the Animals), "John Riley" (the Byrds), "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" (Led Zeppelin), "What Have They Done To the Rain" (the Searchers), "Jackaroe" (Grateful Dead), and "Long Black Veil" (the Band), to name a few. "Geordie," "House Carpenter," and "Matty Groves" inspired a multitude of British acts who trace their origins to Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span. In 1963, Joan began touring with Bob Dylan and recording his songs, a bond that came to symbolize the folk music movement for the next two years. At the same time, Joan began her lifelong role of folk musician by introducing songs from a host of contemporary singer-songwriters starting with Phil Ochs, Richard Farina, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin, Paul Simon, and others. Her repertoire grew to include songs by Jacques Brel, Lennon-McCartney, Johnny Cash and his Nashville peers, and South American composers Nascimento, Bonfa, Villa-Lobos, and others.
At a time in our country's history when it was neither safe nor fashionable, Joan put herself on the line countless times, and her life's work was mirrored in her music. She sang about freedom and Civil Rights everywhere, from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest military spending, and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley. A year later she co-founded the Institute For The Study Of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. In 1966, Joan Baez stood in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking for fair wages, and opposed capital punishment at San Quentin during a Christmas vigil. The following year she turned her attention to the draft resistance movement. In 1968, she recorded an album of country standards for her then-husband David Harris. He was later taken into custody by Federal marshals in July 1969 and imprisoned for 20 months, for refusing induction and organizing draft resistance against the Vietnam war. As the war escalated, Joan traveled to Hanoi with the U.S.-based Liaison Committee and helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast.

John Fahey - (February 28, 1939 – February 22, 2001) was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as American Primitivism, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of his art. Fahey himself borrowed from the folk and blues traditions in American music but also incorporated classical, Brazilian, Indian and abstract music into his eclectic œuvre. In 2003, he was ranked 35th in Rolling Stone's "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". In 1952, after being impressed by guitarist Frank Hovington, whom he accidentally met while on a fishing trip, he purchased his first guitar for $17 from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Along with his budding interest in guitar, Fahey was attracted to record collecting. While his tastes ran mainly in the bluegrass and country vein, Fahey discovered his love of early blues upon hearing Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied" on a record-collecting trip to Baltimore with his friend and mentor, the musicologist Richard K. Spottswood. Much later, Fahey compared the experience to a religious conversion and remained a devout blues disciple until his death. As his guitar playing and composing progressed, Fahey developed a style that blended the picking patterns he discovered on old blues 78s with the dissonance of contemporary classical composers he loved, such as Charles Ives and Béla Bartók. In 1958, Fahey made his first recordings. These were for his friend Joe Bussard's amateur Fonotone label. He recorded under the pseudonym Blind Thomas.

John Gorka - born 1958, Edison, New Jersey, is a contemporary American folk musician. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine called him "the preeminent male singer-songwriter of what's been dubbed the New Folk Movement." Gorka received his first guitar as a Christmas gift, though Gorka alleges that his older brother stole it from him shortly thereafter. He eventually learned, instead, to play the banjo, and began performing in a folk music group at his church. Gorka attended Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and joined the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band which would also include guitarist Richard Shindell. He later began performing solo at the Godfrey Daniels coffee house as the opening act for various musicians who toured there. These included Nanci Griffith, Bill Morrissey, Claudia Schmidt and Jack Hardy. In 1984, Gorka took first place at the Kerrville Folk Festival. Since then he has toured with artists such as Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, Michael Manring, Christine Lavin, Dave Van Ronk, Cliff Eberhardt, David Massengill, Frank Christian and Lucy Kaplansky. As of 2005 he was residing in the St. Croix Valley area near Saint Paul, Minnesota.

John Prine - born in Maywood, IL on October 10, 1946, John Prine’s body of work has become the high-water mark of American songwriting and his songs have found a home in the repertoire of musical luminaries such as Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash and George Strait. On March 9, 2005, at the request of Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, John Prine became the first singer/songwriter to read and perform at the Library of Congress. Prine takes his own sweet time dancing with his muse -- and truly writes what's in his soul. So if it takes him a little longer to compose the songs that capture the moments that reveal the gently folded human truths that bind us all together, it's always worth the wait.

John Renbourn - born in Marylebone, London in 1944, right at the end of the War, had an interest in Early Music. John Renbourn studied classical guitar at school and it was during this period that he was introduced to Early Music. In the 1950s, along with many others, he was greatly influenced by the musical craze of "Skiffle" and this eventually led him to explore the work of artists such as Leadbelly, Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy. In the 1960s the new craze in popular music was Rhythm and Blues, also the impact of Davey Graham was being felt. In 1961 Renbourn toured the South West with Mac MacLeod and repeated the tour in 1963. Renbourn briefly played in an R'n'B band while studying at the Kingston College of Art in London. Although the British 'Folk Revival' was underway at this time, most folk clubs were biased towards traditional, unaccompanied folk songs and guitar players were not always welcome. However the Roundhouse in London had a more tolerant attitude and here, John Renbourn joined Blues and Gospel singer Dorris Henderson, playing backing guitar and recording two albums with her. Possibly the best known London venue for contemporary folk music in the early 1960s was "Les Cousins" in Greek Street, Soho, which became the main meeting place for guitar players and contemporary singer-songwriters from Britain and America. Around 1963, Renbourn teamed up with guitarist Bert Jansch who was visiting London from Edinburgh and together they developed an intricate duet style that became known as "folk baroque". Their album "Bert and John" is a fine example of their playing

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell - Born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada, on November 7, 1943. While recovering from polio in a children's hospital, she began her career by singing to the other patients. After teaching herself to play guitar with the aid of a Pete Seeger instruction book, she went off to art college, and became a fixture on the folk music scene around Alberta. After relocating to Toronto, she married fellow folk musician Chuck Mitchell in 1965, and began performing under the name Joni Mitchell. A singer, composer and lyricist of exceptional talent and unmatched influence, Joni Mitchell has crafted an extraordinary body of work spanning more than 40 years and is widely regarded as one of the brightest musical lights of recent generations.

Joe Hill - With three bullets to the heart, the State of Utah executed Joe Hill on November 19, 1915. In one of the most disputed cases to date, Joe Hill, the most prolific songwriter in the history of the Industrial Workers of the World, was convicted of murdering John Morrison, owner of Morrison Grocery, and his son Arling on the night of January 10, 1914 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
   Margareta Katarina Haaglund gave birth to the legendary Joel Haaglund in Gavle, Sweden on October 7, 1879. His father, Olaf Haaglund, supported nine children, six of whom lived to maturity, by working as a conductor on the Gavle-Dala Railroad. The Haaglunds were a devoutly religious family who did not discuss politics. Margareta and Olaf led the family in songs and taught each child to play the family organ, which Olaf built. Joe Hill, born Joel Haaglund, also learned to play the violin, guitar, accordion, and piano, as his love for music developed.
     Joe quickly became immersed in the IWW and devoted his life to the "awakening of 'illiterates' and 'scum' to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of their part in it." He wrote songs like "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Casey Jones - the Union Scab" to inspire solidarity in the ranks of the IWW and to recruit new members. He encouraged a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency," which was not a call for violence, but rather a sprinkle of sand in the workings of machinery, and, more specifically, the efforts of non-union friendly employers
  In 1914, on his way from California to Chicago, Hill stopped to earn some money in the Utah mines. There he encountered three friends who he had met while working in San Pedro: Otto Applequist and the Eselius Brothers. Edward and John Eselius allowed Joe to live at their house as a guest. Otto Applequist was one of Joe's closest friends and may have been involved in the alleged murder of the Morrison's. Joe Hill was eventually convicted of murdering John and Arling Morrison, and took his last breath in Utah before the firing squad. His trip to Chicago was eventually completed - in a casket.

Jorma Kaukonen - Jorma Ludwik Kaukonen Jr. (born December 23, 1940 in Washington, D.C.) is an American blues, folk and rock guitarist. Kaukonen learned to play guitar as a teenager in Washington, D.C. But before moving to the DC area, Jorma and family lived in the Philippines as a "brat" as he followed his father's career from assignment to assignment before returning to the place of his birth. But it was in DC that he and future Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady formed a band named The Triumphs. He departed Washington for studies at Antioch College where friend Ian Buchanan taught him finger style guitar playing. Buchanan also introduced Kaukonen to the music of Reverend Gary Davis, whose songs have remained important parts of Kaukonen's repertoire up to the present.

Judy Collins - Judy Collins has thrilled audiences worldwide with her unique blend of interpretative folksongs and contemporary themes. Her impressive career has spanned more than 40 years. At 13, Judy Collins made her public debut performing Mozart's "Concerto for Two Pianos" but it was the music of such artists as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, as well as the traditional songs of the folk revival, that sparked Judy Collins' love of lyrics. She soon moved away from the classical piano and began her lifelong love with the guitar. In 1961, Judy Collins released her first album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, at the age of 22 and began a thirty-five year association with Jac Holzman and Elektra Records. Judy Collins is also noted for her rendition of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" on her classic 1967 album, Wildflowers. "Both Sides Now" has since been entered into the Grammy's Hall of Fame. Winning "Song of the Year" at the 1975 Grammy's Awards show was Judy's version of "Send in the Clowns," a ballad written by Stephen Sondheim for the Broadway musical "A Little Night Music." Judy Collins continues to create music of hope and healing that lights up the world and speaks to the heart.

Kate Wolf

Kate Wolf - Kathryn Louise Allen, (January 27, 1942 – December 10, 1986) was an American folk singer and songwriter. Though her career was relatively short, she had a significant impact on the folk music scene, and many musicians continue to cover her songs. Her best-known compositions include "Here in California", "Love Still Remains", "Across the Great Divide", "Unfinished Life", and "Give Yourself to Love". Born in San Francisco, California, she started her music career in the band Wildwood Flower before recording ten records as a solo artist. Her songs have since been recorded by artists such as Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris (whose recording of "Love Still Remains" was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999). Kate was diagnosed with acute leukemia and underwent chemotherapy at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. After recovery and full remission, she returned home and compiled a retrospective of her recordings. As the news of her illness spread, she received support from fans and friends all over the country. Remembering how much Kate had given of herself to the causes and people she believed in, her friends and fellow musicians organized numerous concerts to benefit Kate in her time of need. In September, Kate reentered the hospital for a bone marrow transplant. She was feeling strong and confident, but complications from the operation destroyed her immune system and she never recovered. The 10-year retrospective album Gold in California was released in January 1987. The following spring, Kate Wolf became the first musician inducted into the NAIRD Independent Music Hall of Fame.

Leonard Cohen - For four decades, Leonard Cohen has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a figure whose body of work achieves greater depths of mystery and meaning as time goes on. His songs have set a virtually unmatched standard in their seriousness and range. Sex, spirituality, religion, power – he has relentlessly examined the largest issues in human lives, always with a full appreciation of how elusive answers can be to the vexing questions he raises. But those questions, and the journey he has traveled in seeking to address them, are the ever-shifting substance of his work, as well as the reasons why his songs never lose their overwhelming emotional force. At 72, Cohen continues to produce compelling work, while enjoying the honors that deservedly come to artists who have achieved his legendary status. Documentaries, awards, tribute albums and the ongoing march of artists eager to record his songs all acknowledge the peerless contribution Cohen has made to what one of his titles aptly calls “The Tower of Song.”

Linda Thompson - born August 23, 1947 in London, England, is a British singer. Born Linda Pettifer in the London Borough of Hackney, Thompson became one of the most recognised names, and voices, in the British folk rock movement of the 1970s and 1980s, in collaboration with her former husband and fellow British folk rock legend, guitarist Richard Thompson, and later, as a solo artist. In about 1966 she started singing in folk clubs, and in 1967 began studying modern languages at the University of London, but quit the latter after four months. She changed her name to Linda Peters. By day she sang advertising jingles, including one with Manfred Mann. By night she sang folk songs in coffee houses, meeting up with key members of the folk scene including Sandy Denny. During 1970 she had an affair with Martin Carthy, and was Joe Boyd's girlfriend in the early 1970s. Linda met Richard Thompson in 1969 but they did not record together until 1972. By then she had recorded the Bob Dylan song "You Ain't Going Nowhere", released as an MGM single in 1972 by "Paul and Linda". The Paul mentioned is Paul McNeill - another friend of Sandy Denny's and Alex Campbell.
Her reputation led to her being invited to join The Bunch, a loose supergroup of folk rock luminaries including former Fairport Convention members Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, and Ashley Hutchings that recorded an album called Rock On. This was a set of 1950s rock and roll classics. A single was released from the album: The Everly Brothers' hit "When Will I Be Loved", which was a duet by Linda and Sandy. Later in 1972 Linda and Richard were backing singers on Sandy Denny's solo album Sandy.

Kevin Carmody - is an Indigenous Australian singer-songwriter born in 1946 in Cairns, Queensland. His father was a second generation Irish descendant, his mother a Murri woman.Kev Carmody grew up on a cattle station near Goranba, 70km west of Dalby in the Darling Downs area of south eastern Queensland. His early childhood was simple but happy. He saw few children until the age of seven, mixing mostly with stockmen. The family, although poor and despised by the local white community because of their "mixed marriage" (his father was "mad Irish, fighting Irish" and his mother a Murray) lived largely off the land growing vegetables near the house and hunting and catching everything from kangaroos to fish. At the age of 33 Carmody had the opportunity to go to university where he attended the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, at which he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree, with honours. He later undertook postgraduate studies and completed a Diploma of Education from the University of Queensland, eventually finishing a PhD. While at university Carmody used his guitar as a means of implementing oral history in tutorials, which led to his career in music. His first album, Pillars of Society, was released in 1989 and drew heavily upon country music and folk music styles. Australian Rolling Stone described the record as "the best album ever released by an Aboriginal musician and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia". In subsequent recordings he has adopted a broad range of music styles from reggae to rock and roll. Today Kev Carmody lives out the life of a modern troubadour. He is a travelling singer/songwriter with a base in southern Queensland and an itinerary which finds him touring the world.

The Mamas & Papas - The Mamas & the Papas (credited as The Mama's and the Papa's on the debut album cover) were a vocal group of the 1960s. The group recorded and performed from 1965 to 1968 with a short reunion in 1971, releasing five albums and ten hit singles. The band's first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", was released 1965 and failed to chart. However, the second single, California Dreamin' was released late 1965 and quickly peaked at number four in the US, while it was less successful in the UK, peaking at number 23. The band's debut, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, was released in early 1966 and became the band's first and only number one album on the Billboard 200. In the UK, the album peaked at number three and remains the group's highest charting album there. The third and final single from their debut was Monday, Monday, which became the band's only number one hit in the US. The song brought the band international success when it peaked at number three in the UK.

Maria Muldaur - born Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica D'Amato, September 12,1943, in Greenwich Village, New York, is a roots-folk and blues singer best known for her song "Midnight at the Oasis". Maria Muldaur's musical roots run deep. Born and raised in New York City's Greenwich Village, Muldaur was surrounded by bluegrass, old-timey, jazz, blues and gospel music, but her very first musical influences were from the records of country and western singers Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb. At age five, she would sing Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" while her aunt accompanied her on the piano. As a teenager, Maria tuned into early rhythm and blues and was an avid fan of Fats Domino, Little Richard, Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown. She became interested in the girl groups coming onto the scene and formed her own, The Cashmeres, while in high school.As pop radio became less soulful, Maria turned to the wealth of American roots music that was being rediscovered right in her own backyard. On any given day, she could stroll through Washington Square Park in the Village and hear blues, jug band, gospel and old-timey music. Soon she was hanging out and joining in on nightly jams and song swaps called hootenannies. In the Village, Maria soon became involved with The Friends of Old Timey Music, a group of that traveled to the rural South to find legendary artists like Doc Watson, Bukka White, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt, then bring them north to present them in concert to urban audiences. Aspiring young musicians like John Sebastian, Bob Dylan, John Hammond, Jr. and Muldaur were all pursuing and creating a new wave in American roots music.

Mary Black - born May 22, 1955, in Dublin, Ireland, is an Irish singer. She is well-known as an interpreter of both folk and contemporary material which has made her a major recording artist in her native Ireland, and in many other parts of the world. A legend in her homeland of Ireland, Mary Black has long held the attention of the followers of Irish Music as one of the finest female vocalists in the world. Mary Black's distinguished career has spanned over 25 years from her early days in Dublin folk clubs through ever-escalating success with seven platinum solo albums one of which, "No Frontiers", spent fifty six weeks in the Irish Top 30. Needless to say Mary Black is a seminal figure in Irish musical history and one of the artists responsible for it's blossoming on a global level. Mary released her first solo album in 1983. It reached No. 4 in the Irish Charts and is ranked among the best Irish albums of the early 1980's. It won for her the Irish Independent Arts Award for Music, the first in a staggering list of Music Awards that have continued to the present day. After a successful period working with traditional band "De Dannan", she reunited with producer/guitarist Declan Sinnott to record her second solo album " Without the Fanfare" in 1985. This established what has become a Mary Black trademark - her ability to discover some of Ireland's finest contemporary song-writing talent and through her remarkable voice project the songs onto a world stage. The San Francisco Chronicle later called her "One of the best interpretative singers around".

Maura O'Connell - born November 16, 1958 in Ennis County Clare, Ireland, is a singer known for blending Celtic and folk sounds and filtering them through contemporary American country music. Since her U.S. debut fourteen years ago, the internationally-acclaimed stylist has applied her luminescent voice to the songs of John Hiatt, Janis Ian, Tom Waits, Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Paul Carrack, Karla Bonoff and dozens of other song poets. Along the way, she has earned a Grammy Award nomination and multi-platinum sales success in her native Ireland. She continues to impress with the release of "Wandering Home", a selection of traditional Irish songs as extraordinary as her undeniable talent.

Nanci Griffith - Nanci Caroline Griffith, born July 6, 1953 in Seguin, Texas is an American singer, guitarist and songwriter from Austin, Texas. Nanci Griffith possesses a powerful gift for inhabiting the songs she sings - for communicating unspoken intimacy and heartache through her tender voice and lilting, delicate phrasing. At the outset of a career that has now spanned nearly three decades, Griffith first emerged as a writer of startling depth and subtlety, crafting sparse uncluttered vignettes that revealed a wealth of emotion in even the most humble of characters and settings. With her gifts as a songwriter lending invaluable insight, Griffith has also grown into a formidable interpreter of other people's songs, as demonstrated on such albums as the Grammy® Award-winning Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Neil Young - Neil Percival Young, born November 12, 1945, Toronto, Ontario, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician and film director. Young's work is characterized by deeply personal lyrics, distinctive guitar work, and signature falsetto tenor singing voice. Although he accompanies himself on several different instruments—including piano and harmonica—his style of claw-hammer acoustic guitar and often idiosyncratic soloing on electric guitar are the linchpins of a sometimes ragged, sometimes polished sound. Although Young has experimented widely with differing music styles, including swing, jazz, rockabilly, blues, and electronic music throughout a varied career, his best known work usually falls into either of two distinct styles: folk-esque acoustic rock (as heard in songs such as "Heart of Gold", "Harvest Moon" and "Old Man") and electric-charged hard rock (in songs like "Cinnamon Girl", "Rockin' in the Free World" and "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)"). In more recent years, Young has started to adopt elements from newer styles of music, such as industrial, alternative country and grunge, the latter of which was profoundly influenced by his own style of playing, causing some to confer on him the title of "the godfather of grunge".

Nick Drake - Nicholas Rodney Drake, (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974), was an English singer-songwriter and musician best known for his acoustic, autumnal songs. His primary instrument was the guitar, though he was also proficient at piano, clarinet, and saxophone. Although he failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, Drake's work has grown steadily in stature, to the extent that he now ranks among the most influential English singer-songwriters of the last 50 years. Drake signed to Island Records when he was twenty years old, and released his debut album Five Leaves Left in 1969. By 1972, he had recorded a further two albums, although none sold more than 5,000 copies in their initial releases, while his reluctance to perform live or be interviewed further contributed to his lack of commercial success. Despite this, he was able to gather a loyal group of people who would champion his music. One such person was his manager, Joe Boyd, who had a clause put into his own contract with Island Records that ensured Nick's records would never go out of print. Drake suffered from depression and insomnia throughout his life, and the topics were often reflected in his lyrics. Upon completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake died from an overdose of amitriptyline, a prescribed antidepressant; he was 26 years old.

Patty Larkin - born June 19, 1951, in Des Moines, Iowa, is a Boston-based singer-songwriter. Patty Larkin grew up in a music and arts oriented family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Descended from a long line of Irish-American singers and taletellers, her mother is a painter, her sisters both musicians. She learned at a young age to appreciate the beauty and magic of the arts. She began classical piano studies at age 7, and became swept up in the sounds of pop and folk in the '60s, teaching herself the guitar and experimenting with songwriting. An English major, Larkin wrote songs throughout her high school and college career, starting out in coffeehouses in Oregon and San Francisco. Upon graduation, she moved to Boston and devoted herself to music, playing on the streets of Cambridge and studying jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music and with Boston Area jazz guitarists.

Peter, Paul, and Mary - was a musical group from the United States who were one of the most successful folk-singing groups of the 1960s. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Noel "Paul" Stookey, and Mary Travers. The group was created and managed by Albert Grossman, who sought to create a folk "supergroup". He launched the group in 1961, booking them into The Bitter End, a coffee house and popular folk venue in New York City's Greenwich Village. They recorded their first album, Peter, Paul and Mary, the following year. It included "500 Miles", "Lemon Tree", and the Pete Seeger hit tunes "If I Had a Hammer" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?". The album was listed in the Billboard Magazine Top Ten for an amazing ten months and eventually sold over two million copies - earning Double Platinum certification from the RIAA - in the United States alone.Peter Yarrow (born May 31, 1938 in New York City, New York). He is also a political activist, lending his support to causes ranging from opposition to the Vietnam war to the creation of Operation Respect. Noel "Paul" Stookey (born December 30, 1937). He did not retire after the trio disbanded and, as of 2008, he continues to work as a solo singer and activist. Mary Allin Travers (November 9, 1936 – September 16, 2009) . Almost unique among the folk musicians who emerged from the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s, Travers actually came from the neighborhood. 'Artist Discography'

Pete Seeger - born May 3, 1919, is an American folk singer, political activist, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 50s as a member of The Weavers, most notably the 1950 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight, Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. As a result of an anti-communist blacklist, his career as a mainstream performer was seriously curtailed. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a pioneer of protest music in support of international disarmament and civil rights and, more recently, as a tireless activist for environmental causes. Musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, labor activist, environmentalist, and peace advocate, Seeger was born in Patterson, New York, son of Charles and Constance Seeger, whose families traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower. Seeger grew up in an unusually politicized environment. His father, Charles, had been a music professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where his pacifism won him so many enemies that he quit teaching in the fall of 1918. At thirteen, Pete Seeger became a subscriber to the New Masses. His heroes were Lincoln Steffens and Mike Gold, and he aspired to a career in journalism. In 1936 he heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and his life was changed forever. Seeger spent two unhappy years at Harvard and left before final exams in the spring of 1938. He made his way to New York, where he eventually landed a job with the Archives of American Folk Music. Seeger spent 1939 and 1940 seeking out legendary folk-song figures such as the blues singer Leadbelly and labor militant Aunt Molly Jackson. By 1940 he had become quite an accomplished musician, thanks in no small part to his enormous self-discipline and Puritan rectitude.

Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs - Philip David Ochs, (December 19, 1940–April 9, 1976), was a U.S. protest singer (or, as he preferred, a "topical singer"), songwriter, musician, journalist and recording artist who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and haunting voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight LP record albums in his lifetime. He performed at many political events, including anti-Vietnam War and civil rights rallies, student events, and organized labor events over the course of his career, in addition to many concert appearances at such venues as New York City's The Town Hall and Carnegie Hall. Politically, Ochs described himself as a "left social democrat" who turned into an "early revolutionary" after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which had a profound effect on his state of mind. He was often seen as a radical and also a patriot — though he was also interested in differing political philosophies as well as journalism, and was an avid fan of music and movies. After years of prolific writing in the 1960s, Ochs' mental stability declined in the 1970s and eventually he succumbed to a number of problems including manic depression and alcoholism, and he took his own life in 1976.

Poco - Poco is an American country rock band originally formed by Richie Furay and Jim Messina following the demise of Buffalo Springfield in 1968. A favorite of AOR FM stations in the early 1970s, Poco was considered to be a highly innovative and pioneering band. Although the band charted a handful of Top 20 hits, overall their Top 40 success was somewhat uneven. Throughout the years Poco has performed in various groupings, with the latest version still active today. With 24 original albums and 26 "Best of" and anthology collections, the band boasts a catalog of 50 releases. Their first album, Pickin' Up the Pieces (1969), is considered to be the best and most important album of a new musical genre that united country with rock music. However, the album was not a commercial success, falling short of the top 50 on the Billboard album charts.

Ramblin' Jack Elliott - born Elliott Charles Adnopoz, August 1, 1931, is an American folk performer. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Elliott grew up in a Jewish family and had always wanted to be a cowboy, inspired by the rodeos he attended at Madison Square Garden, during his youth. Pressured by his parents to follow in his father's footsteps and become a doctor, Elliott resisted and instead ran away from home (at the age of 15) to join the then-famous J.E. Rodeo, the only rodeo ranch east of the Mississippi River. The rodeo traveled throughout the Mid Atlantic and New England states. Although he was only with the rodeo for three months (before his parents tracked him down and he was sent home), Elliott was exposed to his first singing cowboy, a rodeo clown who played guitar and banjo and sang songs. Returning home, Elliott taught himself to play guitar and started busking for a living. Eventually he hooked up with Woody Guthrie and lived with him as a kind of student and observer.With banjo player Derroll Adams, he later toured Great Britain and Europe and had a lasting effect on the music scene there. By 1960, he had made three folk albums for the British label, Topic. Playing in the small clubs and pubs of London by day, he would then take his act to the smart, West End Cabaret night clubs. Upon arriving back in the U.S., Elliott discovered he had become well-known within the folk scene. Elliott's greatest influence was Woody Guthrie. Guthrie's son, Arlo, has said that because of his dad's illness and early death, he never really got to know him. Arlo acknowledged that he learned his dad's songs and musical style through Elliott.

Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson - Richard Thompson was born at his parents' home in the Spring of 1949, in West-London, and spent his early years in post war Britain, surrounded by a family with wide musical tastes. Counted among his early influences are Django Reinhardt, Fats Waller, Les Paul, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Flip the coin from his father’s jazz record collection to the early rock and roll music made available to him through his elder sister, including Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis’ Great Balls of Fire, and the eclectic diversity of his multi-generational career becomes clear. Named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the Top 20 Guitarists of all-time and the recent recipient of both an Ivor Novello Award for Songwriting and the 2006 BBC Lifetime Achievement Award, the iconic British folk rock legend is one of the world's most critically acclaimed and prolific songwriters. His work is admired and recorded by such artists as Bonnie Raitt, David Byrne and Elvis Costello. From his teenage years as a founding member of the 1960's pioneering group Fairport Convention to duo work with his then-wife, Linda Thompson, and over 20 years as a solo artist, to scoring Werner Hertzog's 2005 documentary 'Grizzly Man', Richard Thompson's astounding body of work includes over 40 albums of lyrical wit anchored by such a singular acoustic and electric guitar delivery that Newsweek recently announced, 'like all genuine art, it satisfies completely.'

Robyn Hitchcock - Robyn Rowan Hitchcock, born March 3, 1953, is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. While primarily a vocalist and guitarist, he also plays harmonica, piano and bass guitar. Hitchcock's musical and lyrical styles have been influenced by his appreciation of Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Syd Barrett. Hitchcock's lyrics are an essential component of his work and tend to include surrealism, comedic songs, characterizations of English eccentrics and melancholy depictions of everyday life. His themes include what many psychologists view as the roots of modern neurosis - namely, death, sex and eating. (Recognising this theme, he released an EP in 2007 called "Sex, Food, Death and Tarantulas".) Born in London, England. He began his recording career in 1976 with the Cambridge-based punk/New Wave band The Soft Boys, a local group with an interest in the odd concept of 'psychedelic punk'. After the group broke up in 1981, Hitchcock began recording as a solo artist.

Rosalie Sorrels - Rosalie was born in Idaho nearly 70 years ago and lives there now in a log cabin her father built, 30 miles outside of Boise. She has traveled this country, usually driving herself, for 3/4 of a century and wherever she has stopped she has made lifelong friends. She began her career as a folklorist in the 1950's and she has an encyclopedic knowledge of the folk idiom, ranging from the English ballads to Mormon songs to the work of contemporary songwriters -- not just the songs but also the tradition from which they are derived. Her songs and stories serve to create and preserve the oral tradition. Rosalie has recorded over 20 albums and written three books, including Way Out in Idaho, published in honor of the Idaho centenary, a monumental collection of songs, stories, pictures, and recipes gathered in the course of three years spent traveling around her home state and listening to its people.

Shawn Colvin - ,born January 10, 1956, is a Grammy Award-winning American singer, songwriter and musician. Colvin was born in Vermillion, South Dakota. Her formative years were spent in the town of Carbondale, Illinois, where she attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She learned to play guitar at the age of 10. Her first public concert was at age 15 at the University of Illinois campus. Colvin cites Joni Mitchell as a primary influence on her music, and her initial performances reflected that. Colvin began working in the music scene in earnest in the late 1970s, first in Austin, Texas and then nationally. She met music partner John Leventhal during this time; Leventhal became Colvin's producer on several albums. Colvin often lends her talent to contemporaries in the music business; she can be heard singing the backing vocals on the Suzanne Vega hit, "Luka". Vega returned the favor, singing backup on Colvin's "Diamond In The Rough", from her debut album, Steady On. Early in their careers, Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter formed a friendship that led to their frequently guesting on one-another's recordings: Colvin lent her vocals to Carpenter's 1992 recordings "The Hard Way" and "Come On Come On", and Mary Chapin returned the favor on Colvin's "Climb On a Back That's Strong", from Colvin's Fat City album. She also contributed in the studio and onstage to several Bruce Hornsby songs.

Silly Wizard - Generally considered the world's finest performers of traditional and contemporary Scottish music -- and with good reason. Silly Wizard's music is at once driving and sensitive, powerful and poignant, at times hypnotic, often humorous, with sensitive group interplay and virtuoso-level musicianship, particularly from brothers Phil (accordion, keyboards, whistles, guitar, vocals) and Johnny (fiddle) Cunningham. Their repertoire includes centuries-old instrumental dance music along with traditional and contemporary narrative ballads: tales of joy and woe, of men and women, of time and travel, of love and loss. Silly Wizard is not just another folk music group; they rank with the greatest creators and performers from any country from any time.

Simon & Garfunkel - Simon & Garfunkel were an American singer-songwriter duo of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. They formed the group Tom and Jerry in 1957, and had their first taste of success with the minor hit "Hey, Schoolgirl." As Simon and Garfunkel, the duo rose to fame in 1965, backed by the hit single "The Sounds of Silence." Their music was featured in the landmark film The Graduate, propelling them further into the public consciousness. They are well known for their close harmonies and sometimes unstable relationship. Their last album, Bridge over Troubled Water, was delayed several times due to artistic disagreements. They were among the most popular recording artists of the 1960s, and are perhaps best known for their songs "The Sounds of Silence," "Mrs. Robinson," "Bridge over Troubled Water" and "The Boxer." They have received several Grammys and are inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2007). In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Simon and Garfunkel #40 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. They have reunited on several occasions since their 1970 breakup, most famously for 1981's The Concert in Central Park, which attracted about 750,000 people.

Smothers Brothers

The Smothers Brothers - The Smothers Brothers are an American music-and-comedy team, consisting of the brothers Tom and Dick Smothers. The brothers' trademark act was performing folk songs (Tommy on acoustic guitar, Dick on string bass), which usually led to arguments between the siblings. Tommy's signature line was, "Mom always liked you best!" Tommy acted "slow," and Dick, the straight man, acted "superior." In the 1960s, the brothers frequently appeared on television variety shows and issued several popular record albums of their stage performances. Their own television variety show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, became one of the most influential and controversial American TV programs of the Vietnam War era. Despite popular success, the brothers' penchant for material that was critical of the political mainstream (and sympathetic to the emerging counterculture) led to their program's cancellation by the CBS network in 1969. The brothers continued to work, both independently and as a team, on stage, on television and in films during subsequent decades. They continue to tour the country as the longest-lived comedy team in history; 2008 marks their 50th year performing together.

Stan Rogers - Stanley Allison "Stan" Rogers (November 29, 1949 – June 2, 1983) was a Canadian folk musician and songwriter. Rogers was noted for his rich, baritone voice and his finely-crafted, traditional-sounding songs which were frequently inspired by Canadian history and the daily lives of working people, especially those from the fishing villages of the Maritime provinces and, later, the farms of the Canadian prairies and Great Lakes. Rogers died in a fire aboard Air Canada Flight 797 on the ground at the Greater Cincinnati Airport at the age of 33. His influence on Canadian folk music has been deep and lasting. Rogers' legacy includes his recordings, songbook, and plays for which he was commissioned to write music. His songs are still frequently covered by other musicians, and are perennial favourites at Canadian campfires and song circles. Members of Rogers' band, including his brother Garnet Rogers, continue to be active performers and form a significant part of the fabric of contemporary Canadian folk music. Following his death he was nominated for the 1984 Juno Award in the category for "Best Male Vocalist." In 1993 his posthumous album Home In Halifax was likewise nominated for "Best Roots and Traditional Album."

Steeleye Span - Steeleye Span is a British electric folk band, formed in 1969 and remaining active today. Along with Fairport Convention they are amongst the best known acts of the British folk revival, and were among the most commercially successful, thanks to their hit singles Gaudete and All Around My Hat. They had 3 top 40 albums. They achieved a certified "gold" record with sales of "All Around My Hat".The name Steeleye Span comes from a character in the traditional song Horkstow Grange (which they did not actually record until they released an album by that name in 1998). The song gives an account of a fight between John "Steeleye" Span and John Bowlin, neither of whom are proven to have been real people. Martin Carthy gave Tim Hart the idea to name the band after the song character. When the band discussed names, they decided to vote between the three suggestions "Middlemarch Wait", "Iyubidin's Wait", and "Steeleye Span". Although there were only five members in the band, six ballots appeared and "Steeleye Span" won out. Only in 1978 did Hart confess that he had voted twice. Terry Woods maintains that the members had agreed that if more than one person departed, the remaining members would select a new name, and he was upset that this did not happen when he and Gay Woods left the band. The liner notes for their first album include thanks to Carthy for the name suggestion.

Steve Goodman

Steve Goodman - Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Goodman began writing and performing songs as a teenager. By 1969, after a brief sojourn in New York City's Washington Square, Goodman was a regular performer at the well-known Earl of Old Town folk music club in Chicago, while attending Lake Forest College. During this time Goodman also married Nancy Pruter, and paid bills by writing and singing advertising jingles. It was also during this time that Goodman wrote many of his most enduring songs, including "City of New Orleans", the song which would become most associated with Goodman. Goodman's songs first appeared on a locally-produced record, Gathering at the Earl of Old Town, in 1971. Goodman's singing career remained centered around the folk music clubs of Chicago, and Goodman wrote and performed many humorous songs about the city, including two about the Chicago Cubs: "The Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" and "Go, Cubs, Go. Around the time Goodman's career began to take off, he was diagnosed with leukemia. The entire time he was writing and singing, he was also fighting cancer. On September 20, 1984, Goodman died at University of Washington Hospital in Seattle, Washington .

Suzanne Vega - born July 11,1959 in Santa Monica, California, is an American songwriter and singer known for her highly literate lyrics and eclectic folk-inspired music. Record companies saw little prospect of commercial success in the beginning; Vega's demo tape was rejected by every major record company and twice by A&M. In 1984 she was finally signed by A&M, and she is now a Grammy nominated artist. Two songs of Vega's (from her second album – Solitude Standing 1987) that were very popular are "Luka" and "Tom's Diner." The latter has been remade by many other artists.Though born in Santa Monica, CA, after her parents divorced she grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York City. Influenced by her computer systems analyst mother and Puerto Rican writer stepfather and the multicultural music they played, from Motown, folk and cool jazz to Beatles pop and bossa nova, she began playing guitar at age 11 and as a teenager began writing songs. Her 1985 self-titled debut album, co-produced by former Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, was a surprise hit in the U.K., thanks partly to the single "Marlene On The Wall," and was critically acclaimed in the U.S. The New York Times hailed her as "the strongest, most decisively shaped songwriting personality to come along in years."

Tim Buckley - Timothy Charles Buckley III (February 14, 1947 – June 29, 1975), was an experimental vocalist and musician who incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, and avant-garde rock in a career spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. Buckley often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent principally showcased on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca, and Starsailor. His first marriage was to Mary Guibert, with whom he had a child, musician Jeff Buckley. They divorced in 1968 and after this Buckley would meet with his son only once more. Buckley married second wife Judy Brejot Sutcliffe in 1970 and adopted her son, Taylor. As a boy, Tim loved Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Hank Thompson. He also loved the occasional Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis or Miles Davis albums his mother used to play. But country is what he lived. By the time he graduated from high school, he and his poet friend Larry Beckett had written some 20 songs together, which they took to Herb Cohen, who signed Tim with Elektra. Tim was 18 when he signed, 19 when he recorded Tim Buckley. Tim liked the melodic and harmonic flow of "Valentine Melody," "Song of the Magician," and "Song Slowly Song," but for the most part, he later regarded his first effort as just that: a first effort, naive, stiff, quaky and innocent. It was, however, a ticket into the marketplace. There, because he played an acoustic guitar and strummed, they called him a "folk" singer, a misnomer from which he never freed himself. Buckley's untimely death came as a shock to many of his friends and relatives. The drug-related death was in stark contrast to how people had seen him at the time, and his premature death has not stinted his influence on musicians and neither reduced his critical appreciation nor popularity.

Tom Paxton - born October 31, 1937, is a well-known American folk singer and singer-songwriter who has been writing, performing and recording music for over forty years. His songs have experienced enduring appeal, including modern standards such as "The Last Thing on My Mind", "Bottle of Wine", "Whose Garden Was This?", "The Marvelous Toy", and "Ramblin' Boy". He has performed thousands of concerts around the world in such places as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and all over the United States; and his songs have been translated into various languages. Paxton enjoys a strong relationship with fans throughout the world. Tom Paxton's songs can be emotionally affective and cover a wide range of topics, from the serious and profound to the lighthearted and comical.

Tom Rush - Tom Rush began his musical career in the early '60s playing the Boston-area clubs while a Harvard student. The Club 47 was the flagship of the coffee house fleet, and he was soon holding down a weekly spot there, learning from the legendary artists who came to play, honing his skills and growing into his talent. He had released two albums by the time he graduated. Rush displayed then, as he does today, an uncanny knack for finding wonderful songs, and writing his own - many of which have become classics re-interpreted by new generations. Today, Tom Rush lives in Wyoming when he's not touring. His voice has grown even richer and more melodic with training, and his music, like a fine wine, has matured and ripened in the blending of traditional and modern influences. He's doing what he loves, and what audiences love him for: writing and playing ...passionately, tenderly...knitting together the musical traditions and talents of our times.

Townes Van Zandt - John Townes Van Zandt, (March 7, 1944 – January 1, 1997), best known as Townes Van Zandt, was a country-folk music singer-songwriter, performer, and poet. Throughout his career he was widely admired by fellow songwriters, particularly in the folk and country genres, but greater fame eluded him, in part because of his unconventional vocal style and in part because of his erratic personal behavior. Many of his songs, including "Pancho and Lefty," "If I Needed You," and "To Live's to Fly," have been recorded by other notable performers and are considered standards of their genre. Townes Van Zandt was born in Fort Worth, Texas to an oil rich family. He was the third-great-grandson of Isaac Van Zandt, a prominent leader of the Republic of Texas and one of the founders of Fort Worth. Van Zandt County in east Texas was named after his family in 1848. Townes' parents were Harris Williams Van Zandt and Dorothy Townes. He had two siblings, Bill and Donna. Harris was a corporate lawyer, and his career required the family to move several times during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1952, the family transplanted from Fort Worth to Midland, Texas for six months before moving to Billings, Montana.Townes was given a guitar by his father for Christmas in 1956, which he practiced while wandering the countryside. He would later tell an interviewer that watching "Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show was the starting point for me becoming a guitar player... I just thought that Elvis had all the money in the world, all the Cadillacs and all the girls, and all he did was play the guitar and sing. That made a big impression on me." In 1958, the family moved to Boulder, Colorado. Van Zandt would remember his time in Colorado fondly and would often visit it as an adult. He would also later reference Colorado in the songs "My Proud Mountains" and "Colorado Girl".

Travis MacRae - Born September 27, 1984, is a Canadian singer/songwriter known for his folk (or folk blues) music, for his accomplished guitar and harmonica playing, and for his rough, somewhat Southern-styled vocals. He is often, but not always, accompanied by backing musicians on record.Travis MacRae's first official record, titled Silhouettes on the Sunset, was released on the Canadian label Willow Tree Records. Since this release in 2002 MacRae has gone on to release three LP's titled Historic Hills (2003), Travis MacRae (2004), and The Future is the Present Wrapped (2005). Bootlegs of his large collection of demo material have also been circulating among fans and are known as A Brief History 1999-2003 (2003), The Kitchen Demos (2004), and Demos from the Attic (2005).While MacRae has been writing and recording music for the better part of a decade he manages to remain quite the mysterious and alluring figure in the folk music scene. Even though MacRae remains under the radar to most large labels he has managed to develop a passionate, almost cult like following; from folk purists to indie elitists.

Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie - born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. He was the second-born son of Charles and Nora Belle Guthrie. His father – a cowboy, land speculator, and local politician – taught Woody Western songs, Indian songs, and Scottish folk tunes. His Kansas-born mother, also musically inclined, had an equally profound effect on Woody. During his early years in Oklahoma, Woody experienced the first of a series of immensely tragic personal losses. With the accidental death of his older sister Clara, the family's financial ruin, and the institutionalization and eventual loss of his mother, Woody's family and home life was forever devastated.
Woody strongly identified with his audience and adapted to an “outsider” status, along with them. This role would become an essential element of his political and social positioning, gradually working its way into his songwriting; “I Ain't Got No Home”, “Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad”, “Talking Dust Bowl Blues”, “Tom Joad” and “Hard Travelin'”; all reflect his desire to give voice to those who had been disenfranchised.
Toward the late 1940s, Woody’s behavior started to become increasingly erratic, moody and violent, creating tensions in his personal and professional life. He was beginning to show symptoms of a rare, neurological disease, Huntington's Chorea, a hereditary, degenerative disease that gradually and eventually robbed him of his health, talents and abilities.

History of Folk Music

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