Welcome to the latest post in the Homegrown Plus series, featuring powerhouse Ozark duo The Creek Rocks, the recipients of the 2024 Artists in Resonance Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The Creek Rocks was established in 2015 by accomplished singer and banjo player Cindy Woolf and veteran guitarist and singer Mark Bilyeu. Although both Cindy and Mark are songwriters, much of their work has been interpreting the traditional music of the Ozarks region.
The 2024 Artists in Resonance Fellowship provided Cindy and Mark the opportunity to immerse themselves in the field recordings of folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell, who in December 1936 and January 1937 visited communities in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks. On August 21, 2025, the duo returned to the Library at the invitation of the AFC to perform some of the materials they learned here. In anticipation of the event, Mark was excited to return. “We get to take these songs Sidney Robertson recorded on a repeat journey of sorts, from the nation’s capital to the Ozarks and back again,” he said.
In this concert The Creek Rocks bring these old songs back to the Library in shiny new arrangements. Hear it in the player below!
In the interview, we learn more about The Creek Rocks, their dedication to traditional music, and their use of archival sources. We discuss their work as songwriters and as musicians in several bands. Of course, we talk about their current album-length recording project based on the Sidney Robertson Cowell recordings, which will be the culmination of their fellowship tenure. Their debut recording, “Wolf Hunter,” was a similar project, featuring sixteen songs gathered from two well-known folk song collections, those of Max Hunter of Springfield, Missouri (Mark’s birthplace), and John Quincy Wolf of Batesville, Arkansas (where Cindy grew up).
According to Mark, the Sidney Robertson Cowell recordings are probably the earliest audio documents of folk music in the area, yet are virtually unknown locally. Part of the duo’s mission is to make these archival treasures better known in the Ozarks.
The field recordings they explored also preserve what is possibly an earlier stratum of folk tradition, as Cindy pointed out:
“When you go back to those recordings, there’s some melodies that are—just, they sound so different from everything you hear today. They sound kind of ancient.”
According to the duo these ancient-sounding melodies tend to be modal, rather than based on the major or minor keys of Western art music, and they are more common in the Cowell collection than in the later field recordings made by Wolf and Hunter. In the interview they talk about their discovery of some of these modal songs in the collection. View the interview in the player below!
You can find both of these videos with more bibliographic information on the Library of Congress website. You can also find them on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.
Collection Connections and Links
Band and Ozarks Music Links
- First of all, visit The Creek Rocks online!
- Visit “Ozarks Alive,” a cultural preservation project that seeks to document the region’s people and places.
- Read our previous blogs about The Creek Rocks.
- Visit the Max Hunter collection at Missouri State University.
- Visit the Ozark Folksong collection at the University of Arkansas.
- Visit the John Quincy Wolf Collection at Lyon College.
- Visit the Alan Lomax Southern U.S. 1959-1960 recordings, featuring Ozark music and song.
- Visit the DC Bluegrass Union, who helped us promote this concert.
Ozarks Resource Guides
We don’t have a research guide specifically devoted to the Ozarks region, but you can find the relevant materials in two state collections:
Concerts, Other Videos, and Blogs
- Here are most of the old-time music concerts and programs on the Library of Congress website.
- A series of Blog Posts about Ozark singer Lillian Short and some of her songs, with audio.
- A blog post about Ozark collections, including audio examples of the Sidney Robertson Cowell Recordings.
- Here are the blog posts at Folklife Today about Old Time Music, including Homegrown concerts!
- All the blog posts at Folklife Today that mention the Ozarks.
- Find out more about the Artists in Resonance Fellowships.
Thank You!
As always, thanks for watching and listening (and reading)!
The Artists in Resonance Fellowships at the American Folklife Center are intended to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the Center’s Archives.
For information on the Artists in Resonance Fellowships, visit this link.
The American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Concert Series brings music, dance, and spoken arts from across the country, and some from further afield, to the Library of Congress.
For Homegrown Plus blogs, visit this link at Folklife Today.
For information on current concerts, visit the Folklife Concerts page at Concerts from the Library of Congress.
For past concerts, visit the Homegrown Concerts Online Archive.