by Kaitlyn McConnell, The Daily Yonder
September 17, 2025
When Cindy Woolf and Mark Bilyeu took the stage at the Library of Congress, the echoes of generations of Ozarkers reverberated through the auditorium.
Known as the Creek Rocks, the married musical duo was there because of a personal honor. They were chosen as the library’s American Folklife Center’s inaugural Artists in Resonance, a fellowship founded to “support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the Center’s archives.”
That fact led them to the stage. But as they sang, they shared more than themselves. They represented a region – and the Ozarkers, now long gone, who recorded folk music so long ago.
“They are fantastic singers, songwriters, arrangers, and performers, and have released albums of traditional and original material, including songs sourced from other archives,” said Jennifer Cutting, folklife specialist with the Library of Congress, as she opened the concert.
“We’re delighted to be the very first audience to hear the fruits of their research at the American Folklife Center,” Cutting continued. “So please welcome – all the way from Springfield, Missouri – Cindy Woolf and Mark Bilyeu.”
Over about an hour, Woolf and Bilyeu performed folk tunes and ballads, passed down from other continents and cultures before finding their way to the Ozarks, and, ultimately, into their hands and hearts.
I was fortunate to witness the event, one that represented a big moment for those Ozarks musicians.
It felt significant to hear the culmination of those layers of history, tying then and now together, and the recognition that rural voices are important. Because they are: They are the voices of lived experience, linking generations and stories to now – and beyond – and creating meaning along the way.
As Woolf put it of the singers they studied for the project: “At this point, I feel like some of them are my best friends.”
A Passion for Merging Past and Present
Bilyeu and Woolf are generational Ozarkers, both finding music at early ages. Their expertise and experience with Ozarks field recordings far predates this fellowship; “Wolf Hunter,” their first album, was based on field recordings collected by folklorists John Quincy Wolf and Max Hunter in the 20th century.
The duo’s efforts to research and document local folk culture took them to D.C. in 2023 as part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Ozarks program. And that helped lead them to the inaugural voice of the Library of Congress fellowship, which is supported by a bequest from the late Mike Rivers, a well-known folk musician and engineer.
“What Mike Rivers wanted was to facilitate artists getting into the collections and coming out with something new, in the sense that it’s a reinterpretation — the reimagination of the material,” said John Fenn, head of Research and Programs at the American Folklife Center.
“Their project was competitive, in my mind, from the beginning, out of the 20 or so we received that year,” Fenn said of the Creek Rocks. “It was the spirit, the practicality, and the passion for the content.”
As part of the fellowship, Bilyeu and Woolf traveled back to D.C., where they conducted research in the library’s archives.
Their fellowship ultimately focused on the work of Sidney Robertson Cowell, an ethnographer and folk music collector who visited the Ozarks in the mid-1930s on behalf of the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that later became the Farm Security Administration.
It was part of a larger project that sent the music expert to record local musicians in Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina “using a new portable sound recording device to produce acetate discs on aluminum,” the Library of Congress website notes.
“It is the desire of the government to preserve the folk songs of all sections of this country,” Cowell said in the Springfield Daily News in December 1936. “It wants the original songs of each section as sung by the actual inhabitants.”
Cowell’s Arkansas collection provided a new opportunity to discover music that ultimately will be shared with folks back home via the Creek Rocks.
“One of the reasons we wanted to listen to this music was because we wanted to know what folk music from the Ozarks sounded like in 1936,” Bilyeu said. “Because who knows? I didn’t know. We’ve got the Max Hunter Collection and the other ones, but those pick up in the mid-1950s. There’s a big cultural leap from what was happening in the ‘30s to the ‘50s with World War II in between.”
Turns out, there was a difference, Bilyeu said.
While vocals are generally important – “Ozarks folk music, as revealed by these collections, is all about the voice,” Bilyeu said – a key difference is in the way the songs sound. The tunes Cowell collected seemed even more “ancient,” as Woolf put it, due to their musical structure.
She sang a few bars from one of the songs – “I Have a Father in a Kingdom” – that was sung by Emma Hays Dusenbury (1862-1941), who lived near rural Mena, Arkansas, and was known for her vast repertoire of ballads and also because she was blind. Her songs were recorded by multiple researchers in the early 20th century.
“I do like singing with her,” Woolf said. “That’s what we always do. We pull up these recordings, and end up just singing the harmony along with the person. So I love to sing with Emma. There’s just something about her voice, and the songs she sang are just really interesting melodies. ”
“Emma told Sidney Robertson (Cowell) that she set out to learn every song in the entire world,” Woolf said from the concert stage. “She did learn hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, but she said she finally gave up on her goal because she said, ‘Folks just keep coming up with new ones.’
“She’s a national treasure for sure.”
Where the Music Goes from Here
As applause reverberated through the Washington performance, it was clear that those dusty songs, now with new life, made an impact on the audience. And if things go as they should, it’s likely those songs will evolve yet again.
“Before we started, that whole collection of music was an unknown commodity to us. We’ve been through this process of discovery, and of course, the whole point of the fellowship was to take that material and work it up in our own way,” Bilyeu said. “We’re both excited to do that here (in D.C.), for people who are not accustomed to music from the Ozarks, but we’re equally excited to take it back home and present it to the people from the place where the music originally came from.”
It’s part of the music’s evolution from something that was to something that is.
Fenn said the research and programs at the American Folklife Center, and the broader Library of Congress, are not just focused on archiving for posterity. “We’re really invested in the notion that traditional culture is not just locked in amber, but that it is fluid and it moves through places and peoples and times, whether it’s in a recorded medium or passed down orally,” Fenn said. “It’s going to constantly change and reflect what’s going on in that moment.”
“It’s kind of preserving that core – of not just ‘This is how it always should be, this performance of it,’ but ‘This was a moment in time that we preserve, and that moment in time informs others.’”
Which takes us back to the people – past, present, and future – who are linked by those songs.
“(The Creek Rocks) will put their record out; someone who’s 12 or 13, maybe living in the Ozarks, maybe not, might hear and be like, ‘Oh, that’s captivating to me. I want to know more about it,’” Fenn said. “They have the Creek Rocks’ version, and then any other version that will probably be referenced in liner notes or in interviews, right? So it just starts to spread out that web of, in library terms, access and discoverability.”
The Creek Rocks are embedded in this story, too. Studying tunes from the past helps connect them with the people who sang them, they agree, but also gives room for them to find new life.
“You learn one version from your grandma or something, and then you sing ‘your’ version – and it’s different,” Woolf said. “Then someone will hear my version and make it their own. And that’s what folk music is all about.”
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.