Alice Gerrard — Custom Made Woman: A Life in Traditional Music (American Music: New Roots) - with Maureen Loughran

This event will be in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.Alice Gerrard, an award-winning and storied folk and bluegrass musician for over 50 years, is one of the notable few women in a heavily male genre. Custom Made Woman tells Gerrard's story through the music, the folk festivals, the kids, and the relationships--both personal and professional--that defined her storied life and career. Her collaborations with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and 1970s were pivotal recordings during the decades after the American folk music boom of the midcentury; the duo produced four albums that have recently been rereleased by Rounder Records and Smithsonian Folkways. In addition to Dickens, Gerrard has worked with folks like Tommy Jarrell, Enoch Rutherford, Otis Burris, Luther Davis, and Matokie Slaughter, and founded The Old-Time Herald, based in Durham, North Carolina, serving as its editor-in-chief from 1987 until 2003.She's also a lifelong documentarian of the folkways scene, and this book features nearly 100 rare photos--many never before seen--of key musicians, including Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Hazel Dickens, Elizabeth Cotten, Mike Seeger, and more. In telling the story of her time as a player of traditional music, Gerrard gives us a deeply personal way to understand and appreciate a quintessentially American genre that has a long history and thrives to this day.Alice Gerrard is a Grammy-nominated old-time and bluegrass musician whose career has spanned nearly six decades.Gerrard is in conversation with Maureen Loughran, the Director and Curator of Smithsonian Folkways. A public ethnomusicologist by training, Maureen was the senior producer for the nationally broadcast public radio program American Routes in New Orleans, producing long-feature documentaries and segments on Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith and John Coltrane, among others. As a researcher, she documented the sacred and secular music traditions of Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Folklife Program, while her doctoral research explored underground radio, soundscape gentrification and cultural community organizing in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Maureen holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Brown University.The iconic first two albums by Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, Who's That Knocking? and Won't You Come and Sing For Me were released by Folkways Records. Smithsonian Folkways has kept the duo's legacy alive, issuing  Pioneering Women Of Bluegrass (The Definitive Edition) in 2022. Find out more by visiting their website at folkways.si.edu.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781469690360?ic_referral=rMIwMBlN5etSr2Bovnz8KdJXnjG6PFtWCokAJbz7OqowM0-34HNsQU0dp1VyVuCcRcBgB5V9kJEeOgdQhtFtZ_2Sp85juStqKU06BP0I2LuOjhRwkO0Tw2v-BRWPfgMhSbzVkMM