The Creek Rocks, the first recipients of the American Folklife Center’s Artists in Resonance fellowship, will return to the Library of Congress on August 21 to perform in the Coolidge Auditorium. They’ll be playing their own arrangements of songs they gleaned from AFC’s deep Ozark Mountain collections as part of their fellowship research. The concert is free but a ticket is required, which you can get at the link down at the bottom. Before we send you off for tickets, though, we’ll tell you more about the band—including a fun podcast you won’t want to miss.
The Creek Rocks are Ozark musicians Mark Bilyeu and Cindy Woolf, residents of Springfield, Missouri. Their fellowship project is an album-length recording of their own arrangements of songs from AFC’s Ozark collections. In December 2024, as part of their project, they joined us for a week of in-depth research into Sidney Robertson’s Resettlement Administration recordings from Missouri and Arkansas, made in 1936 and 1937. They listened to songs, researched the singers and musicians’ biographies, and looked through the fieldnotes and photos associated with the collection.
The majority of their concert will be materials they found in that research. Apart from being a fabulous concert of newly arranged traditional songs, this will be great exposure for an underused collection: Robertson’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, but these earlier recordings from Arkansas and Missouri 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.”
The Creek Rocks have a fascination with 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. (We wouldn’t be surprised to hear something from our Vance Randolph collection in the concert as well.) In 2023, when The Creek Rocks played at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Cindy and Mark extended their trip by a day so they could pay their first in-person visit to AFC. We played them recordings from our Ozarks collections, inspiring them to further research, and eventually their fellowship application.
Even before visiting us, though, Mark and Cindy were already veteran researchers.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). They’ve also delved into Mary Celestia Parler’s collections at the University of Arkansas, and they plan another album drawn from that amazing resource.
We couldn’t be more excited to have The Creek Rocks come back and play for us. In fact, I think it’s time to hear from The Creek Rocks themselves! You can follow The Creek Rocks online to make sure you don’t miss any career developments. But right now, let’s hear Cindy and Mark talk about some of their research, play some of our field recordings, and play some of their own arrangements on an episode of the Ozarkian Folk Chronicles podcast. (This podcast is not produced by the Library of Congress, but by Curtis Copeland and Hayden Head.) Find it in the player below!
By now, you want to know more about the concert and how to get tickets. We’ve got you covered! The concert is being presented as part of the Library’s “Live! At the Library” Thursday evening programming, and will begin at 7:00 pm on August 21, 2025 in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium—just down the hall from where The Creek Rocks did their research. For more info on the concert, you can go to its event page. To get tickets, follow the big link below.
Get Tickets for The Creek Rocks
We are delighted that we were able to provide research support through the Artists in Resonance fellowship. The fellowship was created with the generous assistance of the late Mike Rivers (1943-2021). 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.
Thanks for reading, and we really hope to see you at the concert!