James E. Akenson
Managing Editor
Ronald D. Cohen is a distinguished scholar of the Folk Revival. Managing Editor James Akenson and Cohen have connections to the University of Minnesota. They became friends at the International Country Music Conference at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2014 Cohen and his colleague social activist Si Kahn presented the Keynote Event titled The Folk Revival, Country Music, and Social Justice. The biographical sketch below provides you with information about all the work Cohen produced on The Folk Revival. Cohen is retired from a distinguished career at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Indiana.
Cohen’s children prompted him to write his memoir so they would have a record of his life as part of their family history. His memories will be presented in short instalments so that International Country Music readers will be able to enjoy and digest the connections of Cohen’s life to the Folk Revival that is part of the Country Music legacy. Below is a biographical sketch and a list of Cohen’s scholarship. The first instalment describing his early years and his growing interest in roots music follows this introduction.
Biographical Sketch:
Ronald Cohen was born in Los Angeles in 1940, and in the mid-1950s he and his brother discovered folk music, beginning with The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and similar folk artists of the time. This passion turned into dedicated scholarship moving Ron Cohen into position as one of the foremost authorities on the history of folk music in America. Cohen received his PhD in American History from the University of Minnesota and is Emeritus Professor of History, Indiana University Northwest, Gary, Indiana. He is the author, co-author, and/or editor of numerous books, articles and publications.
His folk music publications include:
- “Wasn’t That a Time!”: Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995);
- (Co-produced with Dave Samuelson), Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs and the American Left, 1926-1954 (10 CD box with 212 page illustrated book, Bear Family Records BCD 15720, 1996);
- Agnes “Sis” Cunninghm and Gordon Friesen, Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press,1999);
- (Co-produced with Dave Samuelson), Goodnight Irene:The Weavers, 1949-1953 (4 CD box with illustrated book, Bear Family Records, 2000);
- (Co-produced with Jeff Place), The Best of Broadside: 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground From the Pages of Broadside Magazine (5 CD box with illustrated book, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2000);
- Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2002);
- Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 (N.Y.: Routledge, 2003);
- Folk Music: The Basics (N.Y.: Routledge, 2006);
- A History of Folk Music Festivals in the Unites States: Feasts of Musical Celebration (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008);
- (Co-produced with Robert Rieseman), Chicago Folk: Images of the Sixties Music Scene: The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage (Toronto: ECW Press, 2009);
- Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States (Crockett, CA: Carquinez Press/Fund for Labor Culture and History, 2010; distributed by the University of Illinois Press);
- Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011);
- (Co-produced with Jim Capaldi), The Pete Seeger Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015);
- Woody Guthrie: Writing America’s Songs (N.Y.: Routledge, 2012);
- (Co-produced with Will Kaufman), Study War No More: A History of Peace Songs in the United States (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014, distributed by Routledge);
- (Co-produced with Rachel Donaldson), Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014)
- (Co-produced with Stephen Petrus), Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2015);
- Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016);
- “Jews in Folk Music,” Stars of David (Vienna: Hentrich & Hentrich, Judische Museum Wien, 2016), 200-203;
- (Co-produced with David Bonner), Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History, 1900-1970 (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2017);
- Cohen and Stephen Petrus, “Folk Music and Political Activism in Greenwich Village and at the Newport Folk Festival, 1935-1965,” Brett Lashua et al, eds., Sounds and the City, Vol. 2 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 279-302.
- Ronald D. Cohen Folk Music Research Collection
