Musician Profiles

If you want to hear a living master of the different styles of clawhammer banjo that emerged from the Round Peak community, listen to Kevin Fore.   But Kevin doesn't just play banjos: he makes them....

Hi, I'm Pär. I'm a fiddler raised in Svärdsjö, a small idyllic village in Dalecarlia, Sweden. Folk music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember: my parents...

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...

Can you tell me about your path to oldtime? "The first time I heard clawhammer banjo was Leonard Podolack playing on an album by The Duhks, a band from my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. I’ll never...

Ry grew up in Athens, Ohio. While raised around heaps of old-time, he spent most of his teenage years attempting to escape the music of his parents, experimenting with a wide range of instruments...

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,...

Tom Turino was a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1987 to 2014. He has been playing old-time banjo since 1974, as well as a number of other instruments...

I met Chris through the kind of serendipity + hospitality that has characterized most all of my experience in the oldtime community. Chris was in Germany touring with The Fugitives, a band he's played...

Caitlin Hearn is a fiddle player who currently lives in Regensburg, Germany, where she is an English teacher. She got her musical feet wet at age 9, when she began studying classical violin in...

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...