Jeff Place has spent nearly 40 years collecting, recording and archiving American folk music.  He brings that wealth of knowledge, along with an unmatched collection of live recordings and 27,000 LPs, to his 2-hour weekly Bluegrass Country show, Sound Sessions.

Jeff has a distinguished career at the Smithsonian Institution, where he was founding director of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections.  In 1988 he and Anthony Seeger started Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, taking over Folkways Records after its 40 year run in New York City.  Since then, he’s produced and written liner notes for nearly 70 CDs and box sets of American roots music.  His projects have won three Grammy Awards (ten nominations) and numerous Indie and Independent Music Awards, and in 2019 he shared the IBMA Best Liner Notes Award for Epilogue: A Tribute to John Duffey.

Every week on Sound Sessions, Jeff will take a deep dive into the work he has done over the decades, showcasing oral histories and live recordings of numerous festival artists as well as selections from Smithsonian Folkways and other record collections.  Here’s what’s playing:

September

6/7 -Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: an overview, Episode 3
13/14 – Old-Time Music
20/21 -A collection of Singer-Songwriters
27/28 – Sound Sessions from 2006: a feature on Dock Boggs; from 2008 a feature on Doc Watson

Sound Sessions airs on Bluegrass Country on Sundays from 5 to 7 pm, with a rebroadcast Mondays from 7 to 9 pm.