The Creek Rocks: AFC’s First Artists in Resonance

This post was written with AFC folklife specialist Jennifer Cutting. 

The American Folklife Center is pleased to welcome Ozarks musicians Mark Bilyeu and Cindy Woolf (The Creek Rocks), to our Folklife Reading Room. The duo are our very first Artists in Resonance, and are here for a week of in-depth research. Mark and Cindy, who live in Springfield, Missouri, were chosen from among 22 applicants to the Center’s brand new Artists in Resonance Fellowship. The fellowship is intended to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the Center’s archives.

They’re well regarded as songwriters, singers, and musicians, but archival research is not new to Cindy and Mark. Their first album as The Creek Rocks, Wolf Hunter, contains songs they sourced from two collections: the John Quincy Wolf Collection at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas (where Cindy was raised) and the Max Hunter Collection at Missouri State University in Springfield (Mark’s hometown and their current home base). Their upcoming album will feature music from Mary Celestia Parler’s collections at the University of Arkansas.

The duo has also delved into AFC’s collections, not least because one of Mark’s relatives, Bill Bilyeu, was an outstanding fiddler from whom Vance Randolph collected 20 fiddle tunes for the Library of Congress in 1943. In 2023, when The Creek Rocks played at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Cindy and Mark extended their trip by a day so they could come and visit us at AFC. We played them recordings from our Ozarks collections, inspiring them to further research. When we announced the new fellowship, they were eager to apply, and they were delighted when they were chosen as the first recipients.

Cindy, who plays banjo and guitar and sings in the duo, says:

“We are so excited that we were chosen from among so many great artists for this opportunity to research documentary materials from the Ozarks. We’re really looking forward to getting back into the recording studio and seeing how we can work with these wonderful old songs to make them our own.”

During their fellowship, Cindy and Mark are focusing on the materials Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded in Missouri in 1936 and 1937 for the Resettlement Administration. Although Robertson Cowell’s recordings from California have been online here at the Library of Congress for decades, and her recordings from Wisconsin have long been available from the University of Wisconsin, these earlier recordings are less well known. According to Mark, the items in the collection from Springfield, despite probably being the earliest audio documents of folk music in and around that city, “seem to be virtually unknown to our local historical memory, save for but a very few figures immersed in the study of the Ozarks and its folklore.” As Cindy suggested, the ultimate goal is to produce a full-length album of songs from the collection in new arrangements by The Creek Rocks.

While Mark and Cindy are here, American Folklife Center reference librarians, archivists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists are working closely with them to support their research into these precious field recordings. Among other things, we are helping them to discover collection items; obtain rights and permissions; request copies of relevant recordings, manuscripts, and photographs; and determine whether a given song or tune is traditional or under copyright. Of course, we are also allowing them to hear the recordings in the reading room. We even have a guitar and banjo on hand for them to try out arrangement ideas if they get that far along in their process!

Mark, who plays guitar and sings, told us:

“I was most excited to be able to hear what almost certainly are the earliest field recordings made in and around our hometown of Springfield, Missouri. And I was delighted to learn that there is a difference in character between Sidney Robertson Cowell’s recordings and those made a few decades later by Max Hunter… In Robertson’s recordings, it seems like you hear more minor key and modal melodies that you don’t hear as often in later collections.”

As you can see, it sounds like they’re already making interesting discoveries in the archive! Make sure you follow The Creek Rocks online to find out what they do with these great field recordings.

The Artists in Resonance fellowships were created with the generous assistance of the late Mike Rivers (1943-2021). Mike was an internationally known folk musician and a talented electronics, recording, and broadcast engineer. For many years he was a big part of the folk music community in Washington, D.C, as both a banjo and guitar player and a live sound engineer for concerts and festivals. Among other things, Mike was also a member of Pete Seeger’s very first Clearwater Sloop crew, bringing together folk music and environmental activism, and was a member of the resident American folk band at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. Not only are The Creek Rocks a banjo and guitar duo, they headlined the Isekasi City Festival in Japan in 2018, as ambassadors of Isekasi’s sister city, Springfield. Hosting The Creek Rocks seems a very fine and appropriate way to honor Mike’s life and legacy. Over at our guide to Research Awards, Fellowships and Funded Internships, you can find out more about the goals of the fellowship, the expectations for the fellows, and the requirements for applying. In this previous blog post, you can read more about Mike Rivers and the background to the fellowship.