Greetings:

Although one or two people may still be added, there is now a fairly complete list of performers for the 2006 Eisteddfod New York. They are:

Ralph Bodington is a truly superb low-key banjo player and ballad singer in the real old mountain style. He is a returning guest from last year.

John Cohen is one of the great contributors to the knowledge and practice of old-time music in the last 50 years. He is a fine banjo player, guitarist, ballad singer, and an important collector and filmmaker.

Jeff Davis is a great singer of material from the mountains, from the coast, from Canada, very much in the old styles, and a master instrumentalist on everything that has strings.

Julia Friend is a terrific young ballad singer, banjo player, and proof positive that the tradition is not dead.

Paul Geremia is one of the truly great exponents of the old style country blues, a great singer in an idiom not easy to master, and a brilliant guitarist.

The Johnson Girls (Joy Bennett, Maggie Bye, Alison Kelley, Bonny Milner, Deirdre Murtha) are a powerhouse women's sea music group, doing material from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and from to the Maritimes to Britain.

Norman Kennedy is as good as it gets in the unaccompanied Scottish tradition in both English and Gaelic.

Enoch Kent is the gravelly voiced veteran of 50 years of Scottish and English, song, covering it all from the old ballads to the street songs to the songs of struggle for justice.

Mick Moloney is one of the great propagators and teachers of Irish traditional tunes and songs, and a world-class expert on Irish music in America.

The NYU Ballad Singers are a group of students at New York University who have been working on discovering, learning, and singing the traditional ballads of America, Britain, and Ireland, under the guidance of faculty member Evelyn Vitz.

Barry O'Neill is the most laid-back, unassuming singer ever to fascinate an audience with his very unusual repertoire of songs from the streets of New York, to Eastern Canada, to the Victorian parlor.

Serre L'Écoute (Robert Bouthillier, Liette Remon, Gabrielle Bouthillier) electrified the Mystic Seaport festival last year with dynamite version of sea and inland water songs from Quebec and Brittany.

Pete Shepherd, Tom Spiers, and Arthur Watson will be coming directly from Scotland with a terrific set of Scottish traditional songs and tunes, either unaccompanied or with fiddle, melodeon, and whistle.

Dick Swain also has a very unusual repertoire of songs, largely from the Eastern US, from songs of inland water, to parlor ballads, to life on the farm, with lots of great chorus songs.

Zie Mwea (Bernard Woma, Valeria Naranjo, Barry Olsen) bring us the extraordinary tradition of northern Ghana and Côte D'Ivoire, featuring aremarkable marimba-like instrument known as the gyil. The vocals are in a West-African call and response style, and the impact of what they produce is tremendous.

In addition to the foregoing performers, a fine bunch of local folk luminaries will be performing as well. Among them will be Mike Agranoff, Joe Elias, Jerry Epstein, Toby Fagenson, Alan Friend, David Jones, The NexTradition (Ken Schatz and Alison Kelley), Anne Price, Lousie Sherman, Steve Suffet, and Heather Wood.

For further information, please visit the Eisteddfod New York website: http://www.eisteddfod-ny.org/

Be there!

--- Steve