Ellen Stekert, an influential figure in the 50s folk revival movement, releases new album of remastered songs

Australia Broadcast Center

09-07-2025

In 2024, Ross Wylde, a singer-songwriter from the US, stumbled across an unexpected listing on eBay.
It was a previously unpublished photograph of Bob Dylan taken at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where the singer famously debuted his classic song Mr Tambourine Man.
"There's a YouTube video [of the performance] that has 30 million views [now 64 million] and he was wearing the same clothes, that same pea coat and he was smoking a cigarette," Wylde tells ABC Radio National's The Music Show.
Wylde, "a huge Bob Dylan fan" since the age of 12, immediately emailed the seller to ask about the mysterious photo's provenance.
In a stroke of good luck, the anonymous seller replied, revealing her identity: Ellen Stekert, an 88-year-old folk singer and contemporary of Dylan's, who went on to become a leading expert in American folklore. The photo, she explained in her email, was one of a series she'd taken at the famous folk festival.
Wylde, a folk aficionado, was also an admirer of Stekert's, and he emailed her back telling her so. It marked the beginning of a friendship that continues today.
For her part, Stekert pictured Wylde as an elderly fan of "70 or 80", but she soon learned he was much younger — just 25.
"When I finally found out Ross was just a baby, it was astonishing to me because he has a sensibility, a communicative ability and a mind behind it that is very old … and wise," she says.
A year on from that fortuitous exchange, Stekert has released a new album, Go Around Songs, Vol 1 — her first since 1958 — featuring archival recordings remixed and remastered by Wylde.
It's all the more special given that Stekert lost the ability to sing when her vocal cords were damaged during surgery several years ago.
"Ross is just a gem," Stekert says. "He's a gift to the world."
Born in New York in 1935, Stekert first picked up a guitar at age 13 when she was recovering after spending a year in hospital with polio.
"My brother had a guitar he wasn't playing … an old Gretsch with a rounded fretboard," she says.
She figured she could strengthen her right hand through guitar-playing instead of the ball-squeezing exercises she'd been prescribed as part of her rehabilitation.
Her father also gave her a four-volume book by Vance Randolph called Ozark Folk Songs, which she used to teach herself the guitar while she was convalescing.
Stekert's entree into the 50s folk revival scene came thanks to a high school classmate: John (or Johnny, as Stekert called him) Cohen, a founding member of folk outfit the New Lost City Ramblers.
She caught Cohen's attention when she was leaving high school with her guitar one day, having performed "a really corny cowboy song" in a talent show.
Once he ascertained she could play, Cohen introduced Stekert to his friends, who met regularly to share songs and sing together in Union Square and Greenwich Village.
She met other stalwarts of the folk revival scene at these gatherings, including Woody Guthrie, Reverend Gary Davis and Izzy Young, who ran the influential Folklore Center in Greenwich Village.
"That's where I went into the city most of the time," Stekert recalls. "[I] sat on the floor and played the guitar and sang and talked to everybody else who was sitting on the floor and playing the guitar."
Like many of her peers, Stekert's repertoire was composed of traditional songs passed down the generations, such as folk favourite Dink's Song.
At the time, the composition of original songs was a rarity, viewed as unauthentic in the folk revival scene.
"You had to discover the gem rather than create it," Stekert says.
"I remember when [American balladeer] John Jacob Niles was discovered to have written I Wonder as I Wander, he was criticised for it … [even though it was] a beautiful song."
Stekert recorded four albums in the 50s before pursuing an academic career in folklore studies. She completed a PhD in folklore in 1965 and served as a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Minnesota from 1973 until she retired in 2000.
She continued to perform until she lost the ability to sing during spinal surgery.
It was a devastating loss for someone who had dedicated her life to collecting, performing and studying traditional music.
"When I lost my voice, I was really despondent," she says.
She found some solace in re-digitising her back catalogue, a process that underscored to her the value of music and performance.
"Music is a way of touching people and communicating about being human," she says. "Otherwise, it's a very lonely life."
For his part, Wylde was delighted to help Stekert with her project.
"I've always been a fan of home recordings — demos and recordings that are done on small tape recorders from the 60s. There's some sort of magic in them that is sometimes lost when a song is taken to the studio," he says.
"When I heard she had this massive library of tape recordings from the 50s to the 80s and beyond, it really excited me because none of them have been heard before and I feel like they deserve to be heard.
Wylde brought his technology skills to the project, removing the recording hiss and lifting Stekert's vocals above the guitar on tracks such as The Trees They Do Grow High, originally recorded at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1975.
"She has a beautiful voice, so [I] wanted to bring that up and accentuate that," he says.
Wylde is also helping Stekert digitise the "shelves and shelves" of unpublished photographs, recordings and film reels held in her archive.
"Some of these photographs are stunning," he says. "Eventually she'll be known for being a very accomplished photographer."
Also stashed away are never-before-heard recordings by the likes of Reverend Gary Davis, Malvina Reynolds and Dave Van Ronk, significant figures in 20th century folk music.
"The fact that these haven't been heard is just baffling, and it's quite an honour to work on them and help them reach the public eventually," Wylde says.
Wylde says the impact of the folk music revival of the 50s and 60s can be felt in popular music today.
"You can hear those influences much more than you could have in the 2000s' popular music," he says, drawing a line between the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Joni Mitchell.
Stekert points to the influence of figures like Dylan, who put their stamp on folk music and reshaped the musical landscape.
"The historic folk song revival of the 50s, 60s and 70s created a new song form," she says.
"It created the one-person, one-guitar [form] … and it broke away from the moon-June rhymes and the restricting harmonies."
Seventy years on, Wylde believes folk music has grown distanced from its political roots.
"In the 60s, a lot of Bob Dylan songs were about the Zeitgeist or … big topics like war. Everything was topical."
Today, he says, folk music is more concerned with the personal rather than the political.
"But, who knows, maybe that will change, especially in this current climate."