Scott Alarik
For the past 25 years, Scott Alarik has been arguably the most prolific and influential folk music writer in the country. He covered folk for the Boston Globe, contributed regularly to public radio, including seven years as correspondent for the national news show Here and Now, and wrote for many national magazines, including Sing Out, Billboard, and Performing Songwriter.
Alarik is tha author of the new novel Revival, set entirely in the folk world of the 21st century. Even before publication, the love story was earning raves from Booklist and from folk performers like Tom Paxton, Ellis Paul, Catie Curtis, John Gorka, Alison Brown, Mary Gauthier, and Gordon Bok, who called it “just about the warmest, most nourishing book I’ve read.”

Above and beyond his writing career, Scott is also a first-rate folk singer and songwriter. He has recently recorded and released the CD "All That is True", featuring a mix of traditonal and original songs spanning his four-decade career in folk music.

Peter & Mary Alice Amidon
Peter and Mary Alice Amidon are versatile and widely respected performing and teaching artists who for the past twenty years have dedicated themselves to traditional song, dance and storytelling. The Amidons are equally at home doing a concert of stories and songs for adults or children, calling a contra dance for adults or a community dance for all ages, leading harmony singing workshops with adults, or doing an elementary school residency of singing, storytelling or traditional dance. Peter and Mary Alice have been a mainstay at Old Songs for quite a few years, leading our Shape-Note or Choral Harmony sessions. This year they will return to lead the Shape-Note sings.

Molly Andrews
Molly Andrews is recognized as one of the finest interpreters of southern Appalachian music and varied genres, bringing directness and intensity to everything she sings. Born the granddaughter of coal miners in Bluefield, WV, her lineage trails deep into pre-revolutionary southwest Virginia and the 'lost province' of Ashe County, North Carolina, hence a natural affinity for the old songs. She employs particular intuition and versatility as a traditional a cappella and interpretive singer, multi-instrumentalist and songsmith.

Séamus Begley & Oisín Mac Diarmada
Séamus Begley is the quintessential Irish musician known for his sharp wit and famous for pumping out tune after tune at all night sessions with an unstoppably energy. Fiddler Oisín Mac Diarmada, founder of noted group Téada, has been described by The Irish Echo's Earle Hitchner as "one of the most gifted and creative traditional fiddlers playing today". Having toured together frequently in the US during the past two years, Begley and Mac Diarmada have now teamed up in an exciting and intimate new combination, exploring tunes and songs from West Kerry to Sligo and beyond.

Hanneke Cassel
"Exuberant and rhythmic, somehow both wild and innocent, delivered with captivating melodic clarity and an irresistible playfulness," says the Boston Globe about Hanneke Cassel's playing. Such charismatic fiddling has brought the native Oregonian many honors and awards. She is the 1997 U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion, she holds a Bachelors of Music in Violin Performance from Berklee College of Music, and she has performed and taught across North America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and China.

Claire Lynch Band
Long recognized and praised as a creative force in acoustic music, Claire Lynch is a pioneer who continually pushes the boundaries of the bluegrass genre. The current Claire Lynch Band is a powerful juggernaut, a quartet that has the innate ability to perfectly interpret the beauty, subtlety, and genre-defying sophistication of Claire’s music. Blazing her own trail in the mid '70s when there were few role models for a young woman in the genre, Claire Lynch made history when she led the Front Porch String Band, which evolved in the 80’s and 90’s into “one of the sharpest and most exciting post-modern bluegrass bands on the circuit.” She formed her own Claire Lynch Band in 2005 and has consistently been a top pick of prestigious publications, critics and audiences across the nation ever since.

The Clayfoot Strutters
The Clayfoot Strutters are a self-styled “New England-based Contradance Jam Band” who specialize in fusing the modes and melodies of traditional American immigrant music, progressive pop and modal jazz harmonies with hot dance-floor grooves from the Latin, Swing, Afropop and Zydeco/Cajun worlds. As composers and songwriters they actively contribute new repertoire to this emerging style. Featured are core members fiddler, songwriter, and producer Pete Sutherland, Jeremiah McLane on accordion and keyboards, and drummer, vocalist and guitarist Lee Blackwell. Special guests often include: Peter Davis, who plays clarinet, sax, piano, and guitar, bassist Harry Aceto, and banjo and flute player Mark Roberts.

Genticorum
Over the past decade the trad Quebec group Genticorum has become a fixture on the international world, trad, folk and Celtic music circuit. Known for their energy and their stage presence (and often mistaken for a larger ensemble), Genticorum has given more than 800 concerts in no fewer than 15 countries – and is showing no sign of slowing down. Firmly rooted in the soil of their native land, the energetic and original traditional ‘power trio’ also incorporates the dynamism of today’s North American and European folk cultures in their music. They weave precise and intricate fiddle and flute work, gorgeous vocal harmonies, energetic foot percussion and guitar and bass accompaniment into a big and jubilant musical feast. Their distinctive sound, sense of humour and stage presence make them a supreme crowd pleaser.

Sara Grey & Kieron Means
Sara Grey grew up in New Hampshire but has lived in North Carolina, Ohio, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wales, Scotland and England. As a youngster in North Carolina she first heard a lot of mountain music and her love for the old time banjo music and songs developed from this experience. She has carried this interest into her adult life studying folklore and collecting and performing music from the various areas in which she has lived. Sara's repertoire remains as fresh and relevant as ever. She has been concentrating for the last several years on tracing the migration for songs from the British Isles to North America.

Sara's son, Kieron Means, is a singer primarily of traditional songs but also of contemporary songs and guitar player of great merit. He was born in the United States and grew up in Britain gaining a great love of the music of both traditions as well as the contemporary scene. He has become a performer of traditional songs from the US and from the UK as well as his own compositions.

Matt Munisteri
Guitarist, singer, and songwriter Matt Munisteri is a Brooklyn native who grew up as almost assuredly the only bluegrass banjo player on his block. His lifelong interest in 20 century American music led him from finger-style Country and Ragtime guitar, through Blues, to Tin Pan Alley and Jazz. His own music reflects this life-long devotion to the history of American Popular song and demonstrates a unique synthesis of rural and urban, long-gone and contemporary. He is a freewheeling and virtuosic guitarist, regularly called to work with a range of established artists across the jazz and American roots music spectrum, including regular gigs with Mark O’Connor’s Hot Swing; Steven Bernstein’s “downtown super group” The Millennial Territory Orchestra; and with the singer Catherine Russell’s, for whom he also serves as Music Director.

Matt’s highly touted new CD “Still Runnin’ Round In The Wilderness”, (July 2012) is the first volume of his explorations of the “lost” compositions of the under-recognized, but prototypical, American singer-songwriter Willard Robison.

The New Boys of Old New York (Dave Ruch & Jeff Davis)
Red-hot strings ignite an old Long Island fiddle tune; oversized mandolins weave together on a rare Irish song from the Adirondacks; spoons and hambone bring Western NY dance tunes leaping back to life; two lone voices belt out a Catskill lumbercamp song in haunting unison.

Jeff Davis and Dave Ruch present New York State traditional music with a unique flair as The New Boys of Old New York.

Davis is well-known for his authoritative interpretation of American traditional music (“worth a lot of salt” – SingOut!), and Ruch for his deep research and great sense of fun on stage (“Mighty. The audience loved it” – Mick Moloney).   Together, “The New Boys” delight in exploring the unusual and underappreciated. With a pile of fascinating stories and two carriage-loads of instruments, the music of New York’s canallers, Great Lakes sailors, African-American fiddlers, Irish lumberjacks and hill-country homemakers is in great new hands.