Participants
Keynote
Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His critically acclaimed writings on American history and politics include The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008). A longtime fan of folk music, Wilentz has served as the "official" historian-in-residence at Bob Dylan's website since 2001. In 2010 he published a series of provocative essays entitled Bob Dylan in America, which explored Dylan's music within the shifting landscape of American culture. His 2004 liner notes for Dylan's album, The Bootleg Series, Volume 6, Bob Dylan Live, 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall, received a Grammy nomination and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for musical commentary.
Panelists
Ray Allen
Ray Allen is professor of music and American studies and research associate at Brooklyn College's H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. He has written extensively on American folk and popular music, most recently authoring Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival (2010).
Jorge Arévalo Mateus
Jorge Arévalo Mateus has served as the head archivist and curator of the Woody Guthrie Archives since its establishment in 1994. He is a lecturer at the Center for Ethnic Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), and project director for the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York. In 2008 Arévalo Mateus received a Grammy for coproducing the CD The Live Wire, Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949.
Ronald Cohen
Ronald Cohen is professor of history emeritus at Indiana University Northwest. A leading authority on American folk music and culture, his critically acclaimed Rainbow Quest: The Folk Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (2002) is considered a seminal study in the field. Most recently he has authored Woody Guthrie: Writing America's Songs (2012).
Michael Denning
Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies and the director of the Initiative on Labor and Culture at Yale University. An expert in Depression-era cultural history, he is author of the critically acclaimed work The Culture Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997).
Nora Guthrie
Nora Guthrie, Woody and Marjorie's daughter, is director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives. She has recently authored My Name Is New York: Ramblin' Around Woody Guthrie's Town (2012). This year she is co-coordinating, with Robert Santelli of the Grammy Museum, a series of events around the country in honor of the centennial of her father's birth.
Will Kaufman
Will Kaufman is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, England. Most recently he is author of Woody Guthrie: American Radical (2011). A talented folk singer and instrumentalist, he has performed hundreds of musical presentations on Woody Guthrie's music throughout Europe and the United States.
Robbie Lieberman
Robbie Lieberman is professor of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. A scholar of the U.S. left in the 20th century, she is the author of My Song Is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (1989/1995), which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.
Ernie Lieberman
Ernie Lieberman sang with the Gateway Singers in the 1950s and the Limelighters in the 1960s. He was active in the People's Songs, a New York City–based organization that blended folk singing and leftist politics, and was one of the first editors of the folk music magazine Sing Out!
Dave Marsh
Rock and folk music critic Dave Marsh has written numerous books on American roots music, including his popular Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story (1979) and Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (1987). In 1990, working with co-editor Harold Leventhal, he assembled and edited Pastures of Plenty: A Self Portrait, The Unpublished Writings of an American Folk Hero, Woody Guthrie.
Robert Santelli
Robert Santelli is director of the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles. He has written extensively on American roots music, co-editing Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie (1999) and recently authoring This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folk Song (2012).
Elijah Wald
Journalist and folk blues guitarist Elijah Wald has published 11 books on American folk and popular music including Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor of McDougal Street (2006), Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (2005) and Josh White: Society Blues (2000). In 2002 he won a Grammy Award for his liner notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box: "The Journey of Chris Strachwitz."
