Musician Profiles

Most every moment playing oldtime is lost to eternity, and that, perhaps, is a great part of its joy. As we sit with friends old and new, we dig into the now, riding the...

Like all performers and teaching musicians, Tricia Spencer’s life looks a lot different this year. While she’d typically be in the middle of festival season and travelling to oldtime camps around the country to...

I'm from Sweden. I grew up in Stockholm, but now live in Gothenburg in the south of Sweden. I've been playing oldtime for about ten years, but got introduced to it before I was...

My first exposure to old-time music was probably when Hobart Smith came to perform at my high school outside of Chicago. Within a few weeks, I had gone down to The Old Town folk school...

I haven’t listened to or seen this interview since I did it at Clifftop, and as it was conducted in the crazy haze that is the Appalachian String Band Festival, I don’t remember what...

Introduction John P. Williams is an oldtime fiddler from Madison, Missouri who grew up deeply entrenched in the tradition of Missouri fiddling. John was a regular attendee of the Bethel Youth Fiddle Camp and apprenticed...

Many people have told me over the last several years that I certainly have lived an interesting and exciting life. I was orphaned at birth, then later adopted from the Children’s Home Society and...

I grew up about as far away geographically from the regions where old-time music originated as you could imagine, but American culture was all around me in my home country of New Zealand, in...

I grew up in Washington state and started playing old-time music when I was 18 years old. My parents were migrant fruit pickers in the 1970s and ‘80s and both are writers and artists,...

Old Time Music came to me after I had not played any music for several years.  My mother taught piano and music in the elementary school and my dad played sax in college and the...