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Performer Bios and Info: Peter Blood (64-68) was already leading singalongs before coming to Oberlin. This passion led him and his wife Annie Patterson to create the songbook Rise Up Singing, which has sold over a million copies since it was first published in 1988. Peter was publications director of the folk music nonprofit Sing Out, from 1988-92 and served on its board for a decade. He has worked closely with Pete Seeger on several projects including editing his autobiography, Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Annie produced the 20 "Teaching Disks" that accompanied Rise Up Singing and was vocalist on the majority of these CDs. She has been a vocalist for two decades with the swing bands Big Nite Out and Girls from Mars and also performs and records as a folk artist. Annie and Peter have performed hundreds of sing along concerts, workshops, and retreats using Rise Up Singing and its predecessor, Winds of the People. They are members of AFM Local 1000, the union representing traveling musicians. Richard Carlin (74-78) took his BA in English at Oberlin, but has remained active in writing about and performing traditional music. He is author of several books on traditional music, most recently Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary. From 1975-80, he produced 10 albums of traditional music for Folkways Records. His instruction book for English concertina, written and published when he was an Oberlin student, has remained in print for over 25 years, and is due in a 2nd edition shortly. He is currently Executive Editor for Music and Dance books at Routledge Publishing in New York City. Judy Cook (66-71) tours regularly in the US and Britain. She presents splendid unaccompanied ballads and songs from a huge and varied Anglo/American repertoire. Typically programs include powerful variants of British ballads, American narratives, chorus songs and sprinklings of whimsical pieces. Her presentation and deliver expresses her joy of singing and delights listeners. Judy graduated from Oberlin with a degree in psychology. She began performing professionally in the early 90s. Her first recording of unaccompanied traditional songs and ballads, "If You Sing Songs" was released in 1998, the same year as her first singing tours. It was followed two years later by "Far From the Lowlands." She has quickly come to be well respected on both sides of the Atlantic as a singer and propagator of the old songs. For more information visit her website at www.JudyCook.net or send email to judy@judycook.net The Folksmiths were a group of 8 square-jawed enthusiastic Oberlin College students. We organized in the fall of 1956 and subsequently taught and performed at ca. 20 camps, 2 resorts, and 1 college (Goddard) in the US northeast during the summer or 1957. We also performed at a Sing Out! Hootenanny in NYC in June and recorded an LP for Moe Asch in August of that year. The LP was We’ve Got Some Singing to Do; The Folksmiths Traveling Folk Workshop. It sold like tepid-cakes. It is now available on custom cassette and CD through Smithsonian Folkways Records (www.si.edu/folkways; tell them Joe sent you!) The 8 Folksmiths were Joani Blank ('59), Chuck Crawford ('60), Joe Hickerson ('57), Mark (‘Bo) Israel ('59),Sarah Newcomb ('60), David Sweet ('58), and Ruth Weiss Bolliger ('59). Our appearance at the Oberfolkie Reunion is dedicated to the memory of the late Ricky Sherover. Joe Hickerson (1953-57) was first president of the Oberlin Folksong Club(1/57), co-director (with Joani Blank) of the 1st Annual Oberlin Folk Festival (5/57), and had a folk music show on WOBC. He received an MA in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University in 1961. In 1960 he wrote the 4th and 5th verses of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." From 1963-98 he has served as Librarian/Director of the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song/Archive of Folk Culture. He has served as board member and advisor to numerous folk music and folklore societies and publications. His recordings for Folkways and Folk-Legacy range from 1957 to 2003 and he appears on the recordings of other artists and of festivals. Joe has been called a "vintage pre-plugged paleo-accoustic folksinger" (J. Hickerson) and a "great song leader" (P. Seeger). He sings "folksongs and allied forms that I like and can remember," and his concerts are guaranteed to “Drive Dull Care Away.” Joe can be contacted at www.joehickerson.com, jhick@starpower.net, and 301-270-1107. Roderick Knight, , professor of ethnomusicology, began teaching at Oberlin in 1976. His specialty is the music of the Mande or Mandinka people of The Gambia, West Africa, where he conducted his doctoral field work in 1970, focusing on the kora and the vocal repertoire of the jali, or professional musician. He returned to the Mande area in 1982 and 87. In 1982 he also conducted field work in India, focusing on the tribal populations of Madhya Pradesh. In 1990 and 2003 he conducted brief research trips to the Carribean, documenting music in Carriacou (Grenada) and the Dominican Republic. His research has been published in numerous journal articles and in commercial audio and video releases on Africa and India. Mary LaMarca (74-78) attended Oberlin as a chemistry and biology major. She learned that singing was fun (even for science majors) in Oberlin’s Musical Union, under the direction of Daniel Moe. The Oberlin Folk Music Club was very active during those years and its concert series hooked her on traditional music. Now a researcher at NIH, over the past 25 years she has also been a singer, ceili dancer, folk festival manager, crew member, folk bureaucrat, and hostess for itinerant musicians. She performs with her husband George as "Stephens and LaMarca", singing songs and ballads from the US, British Isles, and Australia. Their repertoire includes both traditional and contemporary songs that tell a story or paint word pictures; ancient ballads, historical broadsides, the poems of Kipling or Lawson, and songs about workers and their work. Although not a full-time musician, her life has been enriched by gathering with friends to swap songs and tunes, working with performers from different cultures and hosting musicians from New York to New South Wales. And it all started at Oberlin. Brad Leftwich (71-75) plays music that is a direct link to the old-time traditions of the southern Appalachian and Ozark regions. A noted fiddler, banjo player, and singer, he has been performing for some 30 years, both solo and in bands including Plank Road, Leftwich and Higginbotham, and Tom Brad and Alice. Recordings of his music appear on the County, Copper Creek, Rounder, and Marimac labels, and he has published instructional materials with Homespun Tapes and Mel Bay Publications. Brad has won the fiddle contest at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, WV. He tours internationally, and has performed at venues from the White House to the Philadelphia Folk Festival. For more information on Brad’s music and activities, visitwww.tombradalice.com. Caroline (Swenson) Paton (50-52) was already interested in folk music when she came to Oberlin. She enjoyed learning and singing songs at camp was exposed to the songs on Carl Sandberg’s recordings in high school, some of which struck her with their refreshing honesty and directness. At Oberlin she learned a number of American and international songs from other students. She remembers that at Tank Hall, after meals, "we used to gather around the piano and sing songs from the Fireside Book of Folk Songs." She decided to write her English term paper on some aspects of Southern Appalachian folk music. In 1952 she transferred to U. Chicago and, after graduating, went to Berkeley, California, to live and work. She met her husband, Sandy, at a concert he gave there in 1957. Folk music brought them together and is still their vocation and advocation. With Lee Haggerty, they founded Folk-Legacy Records in 1961 and have been operating it ever since. Neil V. Rosenberg (57-61) became interested in folk music as a teenager in Berkeley, California and performed at local venues. At Oberlin he was president of the Folksong Club in 1960-61 and a founding member of the Plum Creek Boys, Oberlin’s first bluegrass band. He received a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, where he became administrator and archivist in 1966. In 1968 he moved to Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada’s only English-language folklore graduate program. There he taught a variety of courses and was Director of the Folklore and Language Archive from 1976 to 1990. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society and recipient (2001) of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada’s Marius Barbeau Award, he has published extensively. He won a Grammy in 1997 for his contribution to the album notes of the Smithsonian/Folkways “Anthology of American Folk Music.” He performs with the bluegrass band Crooked Stovepipe, jams with the spontaneous collaborative improvisation group The Black Auks, and plays old-time music from Newfoundland and beyond with Terri Thomson. Fred Starner (55-59) ran across folk music at a Pete Seeger Concert in 1956 and heard Joe Hickerson a couple of times. His last two years at Oberlin he roomed with Bill Svanoe, later of the Rooftop Singers. Fred got a broken down banjo his junior year and plunked around inconclusively. In the fall of 1968 he heard about the Clearwater project with Pete Seeger, wrote him a letter, and was invited with his wife to join the first singing crew the summer of 1969. Two years later he was invited to co produce and host a 10 part series on folk song at New Jersey Public TV; "Oleanna Trail." He founded the Great River Folk Festival in 1976 at UW Lacrosse where he taught. In the past 10 years he joined the Hobo Community, rode two freights, and attended 40 hobo gatherings around the country. His hobo and activist songs have been aired on Democracy Now!, Peace Watch, Pacifia Raido Network, and Independent Media Network as well as a number of community radio stations nation wide. His website is http://home.earthlink.net/~fstarner. Contra Dance Band:Plum Creek String Band-Eric Stewart, Bruce Comings, Marion Parker and Jamie Davis. Contra Dance Caller:Suzanne Friedman (’04) |