Ellen Stekert: The New Old Sound

Outside of the movies, a person typically can’t encounter her younger self as if a stranger, perceive her gifts and her challenges, and provide a friendly assist. But that is what Professor Emerita and folklore scholar Ellen Stekert is doing. The young Stekert was a prominent folksinger and guitarist in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s. She met Woody Guthrie, hung out with the Seeger family and the New Lost City Ramblers, and recorded four albums well before Bob Dylan showed up to Greenwich Village (he noted her importance to the scene in Chronicles: Volume One). This year, as she turns 90, Stekert has released her first album since 1958, a collection of archival recordings from the ‘50s to the ‘80s titled Go Around Songs, Vol. 1. More releases are in the works.

“I enjoy listening to that person,” says Stekert of selecting favorite tracks from her archives. “I didn’t realize back then that I really was doing a good job. I’ve never been a very good critic of myself.”

Stekert began exploring her library of personal recordings in 2020, with the larger intent of digitizing hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes including interviews, live shows, and field recordings. She had recently lost her singing voice due to a surgery on her upper spine, and “was feeling despondent.” And there it was preserved, that expressive contralto, if scarred by tape hiss and microphone bleed. With the help of two fans of her work—former student and English alum Christopher Bahn and Californian folk singer Ross Wylde—Stekert has been able to spring her younger self free from the past and meet her anew. “I didn’t know I could play the guitar so well either,” she says with a laugh, over a Zoom call. 

Key player in folk song revival

Born in 1935 in New York, Stekert was raised in what she calls “the privileged suburb” of Great Neck on Long Island. As a teen, she contracted polio. “I had stolen my brother’s guitar to use it to try to exercise my hands and my lungs,” she recalls. After a hospitalization, her father bought her the four-volume set of Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs books. The printed lyrics were “a window on a totally other world. I couldn’t figure out what people were talking about in the songs. I realized there was a whole part of life I didn’t know a thing about, and I wanted to investigate it more.”

Stekert carefully picked out the musical notes from the book’s song collection. One day a high school classmate saw her carrying the guitar and asked if she could play. “I said, ‘Yes, do you?’” It was hail fellow, well met: John Cohen had a folk group, knew Guthrie and the Reverend Gary Davis, and was dedicated to bringing people together to sing, whether in Great Neck or Greenwich Village. “I thought, ‘There’s a group I can join, and finally somebody’s going to tell me how to strum this thing,’” remembers Stekert. 

Stekert soon became deeply engaged with the folk revival community centered in the Village, meeting Guthrie, taking guitar tips from Davis, and performing regularly at clubs and gatherings. “The one party I remember most vividly is when I stole my parents’ car and drove into the city illegally. You couldn’t have a learner’s permit and drive in New York City. I was told to go to such and such address and pull on the rope hanging out of the third story apartment.”

Even as she enrolled at Cornell University, studying philosophy, she continued to make music in New York, cutting her 1955 debut Ozark Mountain Folk Songs at a record store on Union Square. A second album, Ballads of Careless Love, was released in 1956. She also dated Izzy Young, who in 1957 opened the Folklore Center, a celebrated store and community space, on MacDougal Street. “I used to go there often,” she says, “and sit on the floor with other people, and we’d just sing and talk to each other. We had discussions, like, ‘Who can sing folk songs?’ You had to be authentic and ‘ethnic,’ whatever that meant.”

Stekert’s voice was more “understated urban pop” than Appalachian, she says, “derivative of people like Jo Stafford.” Its sound might have put off folk purists, but the personality in that voice—bracing, knowing, and wryly humorous—makes tracks from the new album sound timeless. 

From collecting to academia

Part of being a folksinger at that time meant you were a collector: of songs and techniques and practitioners. Stekert graduated from Cornell in 1957, the same year she released a collaboration with Milton Okun, Traditional American Love Songs. Her interest in folk song collection led to enrolling at Indiana University for an MA in folklore and anthropology and then the University of Pennsylvania for doctoral studies in folklore. She did fieldwork in Kentucky and New York, interviewing and recording singers including Sarah Ogan Gunning, Ezra “Fuzzy” Barhight, and Willie Nolan. 

Academic and musical interests intertwined in her fourth album, a 1958 set of Barhight’s tunes called Songs of a New York Lumberjack, for Folkways Records. Barhight and Nolan became the subjects of Stekert’s 1965 dissertation, “Two Voices of Tradition: The Influence of Personality and Collecting Environment upon the Songs of Two Traditional Folksingers.”

Stekert has lots to say about the missteps of traditional folklore scholarship, from its classist focus on rural culture (“Urban people have folklore too, but it's easier to, as I call it, ‘collect down’ by class, than to try to collect up”) to the wrongheaded theory that folk songs appear suddenly all of a piece and maintain integrity across generations (“It’s human beings who pass them on, and performers don’t just change the song once or twice, you change it situationally”). For her dissertation, Stekert showed how two singers worked creatively with songs over time, as the songs’ meaning changed for them. “All performers should be considered creative,” she says, not just songwriters.

By the time Stekert earned her PhD, Joan Baez and Dylan had sucked the air out of the folk revival and levitated into stardom. “A thundering truck” is how Stekert terms Baez’s 1960 arrival into New York “with that voice.” In a scene where, she says, “it was mostly guys who produced and wrote and sang, even if they didn’t have good voices,” Baez was the exceptional woman granted greater recognition. As for Dylan, Stekert acknowledges his genius at piecing together memorable songs from disparate parts, but wishes he had given credit to those whose tunes and lyrics he repurposed. If the folk tradition was “go around songs,” Dylan stopped the free flow, she says, freezing them into versions under his ownership.

It's not that she begrudges these ascents to stardom. Stekert is clear that her younger self had opportunities for larger success: there was a 1959 appearance on CBS’ program Camera Three that she might have done more to make use of; there were offers for Broadway musical auditions and folk group membership that she declined. “By that time, I was so engrossed in studying folklore,” she says, “that it was difficult to extricate myself from that without throwing away years of focus toward a career as a professor.” 

As she notes on her blog, “I would have had to give up my graduate work, and above all else, I loved learning, even though I loved singing almost as much.”

Years in Minnesota

Stekert taught folklore along with literature and writing at Wayne State University from 1963 to 1972. The University of Minnesota English department hired her in 1973 to solely teach folklore. “I loved my classes,” Stekert enthuses. “I could teach anything I wanted. You see, there’s folklore in absolutely everything. By the time I retired [in 2000], I was teaching a course in horror film, which I really enjoyed. Every culture has a different type of horror, different things that frighten them.”

Stekert appreciated the support of colleagues such as Nancy Armstrong, who went on to teach at Brown. “And Tom Clayton was just wonderful to me,” she says. “People like Margery Durham and Lonnie Durham and Genevieve Escure were very, very helpful.” 

Stekert had a lot on her plate. She wrote the legislation and helped the bill get passed in 1976 establishing the Center for Minnesota Folklife, and Governor Rudy Perpich named her its head as the first Minnesota State Folklorist (she directed it until 1980). The year 1976-77 was also the year she served as president of the American Folklore Society; she was on the AFS executive board from 1969 to 1978. As a folklore and urban legend expert, she consulted with the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Walker Art Center on multiple exhibits. She served as arts commissioner for Minneapolis from 1975 to 1978. At the U, she was an early advocate for disability accommodations: unexpectedly, polio had returned, in the guise of chronic post-polio syndrome. 

All the while, she kept singing and playing. (An EP of a live performance in 1975 at the Walker has also been released this year.) She sang and played, until she couldn’t. Until that surgery severed a nerve to a vocal cord. 

But there was that archive. Stekert says her tapes have mostly been kept in temperature-controlled settings, as she lived for many years in south Minneapolis with partner Beth. But now the tapes are growing fragile. There’s an urgency to digitizing not only her own music recordings but her photos, her interviews, her historically significant field work. In 2023, former student, now media consultant Christopher Bahn, helped create Stekert's website and blog and get the digitization process started. Then Stekert connected with 26-year-old folksinger Ross Wylde, after she sold him one of her 1964 photos of Dylan over eBay. 

Go Around Songs is the result of Stekert’s selections and Wylde’s use of artificial intelligence to separate sounds and remove hiss before remixing. “I just picked the songs I liked, liked the renditions of,” says Stekert. “I tried to think, like when I was putting a concert together, what kinds of things are going to fit together: some amusing things [“Jolly Old Sigmund Freud”], as well the lyrical things [“Tomorrow Is a Long Time”], which I really like best.”

This album is then a cross-generational effort—including Stekert collaborating with those past selves, once again present: creators taking in cultural knowledge and transmuting it in the fire of the moment, the self and the audience, the play. “Performance is a creative act,” as Stekert said in a recent Australian radio interview. “Music is a way of touching people and communicating about being human. Otherwise, it’s a very lonely life.”