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209 Note on Sources My research on Mike Seeger began as early as 1959, when I started buying records made by him and the New Lost City Ramblers. Not too long after that, I also obtained the important anthology that he produced for Folkways, Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, and his first solo album, Old Time Country Music. These were my introductions to the Folkways catalogue and to the eccentric but useful liner notes that the record jackets contained. Songs and information learned from these recordings, and from The New Lost City Ramblers Song Book (New York: Oak Publications, 1964), became significant ingredients of my first book, Country Music, U.S.A. (1968). I renewed my immersion in that material when I began working on this biography. After our first real meeting in London in 2003, when we agreed that I would write his biography, Mike began providing contact information for his relatives and peoplewho had been instrumental in his career. Only a couple of years later, he also began dictating reminiscences and detailed data about his life and career into a recording unit, which in turn were transcribed by Charmaine Harbort in Madison, Wisconsin. Mike typically filled up the tapes he was using and then taped over them after Charmaine had finished her transcriptions . Mike spent an enormous amount of time making these details of his life and career available. The reader can assume that when material is supplied in this manuscript without attribution, the information came from these dictated notes.This material, along with the taped interviews that I compiled, will be deposited in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also interviewed Mike Seeger extensively on February 5, 6, and 19, 2004. Since that time, I enjoyed contact with him quite often through phone calls, conversations, and e-mails. He even appeared at least a couple of times (September 2, 2002, and April 13, 2005) as a guest and cohost on my radio show, Back to the Country, on WORT-FM in Madison .These programs were also taped. He made available his recording logs, which detailed the performances that he recorded at his home in Maryland, at the country music parks in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and in other venues throughout the United States. I visited his home in Lexington, Virginia, for several days in April 2008 and was able to see an extensive number of personal letters, business records, brochures, flyers, promotional material , and other data that helped to clarify his career and personal relationships. I found other letters and similar data at the Ralph Rinzler Collection at the Smithsonian Institution (including the Moe Asch Collection) that were immensely helpful. Judith Tick also provided some letters and interviews that she had used in her biography of Mike’s mother, 210 NOTE ON SOURCES Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). This material also included transcripts of interviews done with various members of the Seeger family by Matilda Gaume for her doctoral dissertation at Indiana Universityon Ruth Crawford Seeger in 1973 (published as Ruth Crawford Seeger: Memories, Memoirs, Music in 1986) and by Karen Cardullo for her master’s thesis on Ruth Seeger at George Washington University in 1980. Other interviews and conversations that proved very helpful to me were with Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Barbara Seeger Perfect, Marjorie Seeger Marash, Alice Gerrard, Alexia Smith, Kim Seeger, John Cohen, Tracy Schwarz, Hazel Dickens, Richard Spottswood , Pete Kuykendall, Bill Clifton, Archie Green, Judith Tick, Alan Jabbour, Paul Brown, Dom Flemons, Ed Pearl, Roland White, Kate Hughes Rinzler, David Grisman,Yasha Aginsky ,Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, David Winston,Tom Piazza, Hank Bradley, Mac Benford,Todd Cambio, Tim O’Brien, Phil Jamison, Rick March, and Peter K. Siegel. I did not interview Roger Abrahams,Carol Elizabeth Jones, Howard Romaine, Henry Sapoznik, or Israel Young, but I received lengthy and highly informative e-mails from each of them. Henry Sapoznik also read chapter 5 of my manuscript. I also profited greatly from interviews conducted by other people who were gracious enough to make the transcripts or disc copies available to me. Richard Straw, of Radford College in Virginia, was extremely helpful to me. He did extensive interviews with Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen,Tom Paley,Tracy Schwarz, and Hazel Dickens.William Ferris sent me a copy of his published interviews with Charles Seeger (Southern Cultures 16, no. 3 [Fall 2010]: 54–72) as well as the original...

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