Greetings Folks!
I hope 2024 is off to a positive start for everyone. In the future, I will be writing and working in communications for Music Maker Foundation. This year marks their 30 year anniversary! I’m proud to be part of this prestigious team.
Music Maker Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to meeting the day-to-day needs of artists who create traditional American music by assisting them with life essentials, instruments, recording and touring. Music Maker Foundation’s tremendous catalog includes 520 artists, and a vast collection of hidden musical treasures available to all music fans.
Tim and Denise Duffy founded Music Maker in 1994 to preserve and support our nation’s musical traditions by improving the lives of the artists who make them. The foundation concentrates on the essential musical traditions of the South: blues, gospel, string band, folk, Native American, and singer-songwriter. These traditions form the very roots of our nation’s musical culture.
In celebration of Music Maker Foundation’s 30th anniversary Song Keepers: A Music Maker Anthology will be released on February 16, 2024. Song Keepers delivers timeless photographs by Tim Duffy, soulful stories by the esteemed Georgann Eubanks and a box set of 86 songs by Music Maker artists. These recordings have been masterfully curated and thoughtfully arranged to highlight and explore four facets of American roots music: Acoustic Blues, Electric Blues, Sacred Soul and Gospel and Eclectic Folk. Song Keepers includes liner notes for each album that delightfully illuminate the music and the artists with accessible musicology and profiles.
Please check them out. It’s a great cause to support. You’d be helping some of America’s finest music pioneers. I’ll provide high-grade content on almost a daily basis. I’m humbled to be part of this soulful organization. I was one of the early journalists to the Music Maker party all those decades ago. It’s gonna be a big year. Tune In!
Mahalo…
JC
(Photograph of Joe Lee Cole taken in Bobo, MS., by Tim Duffy in 2001)