Executive Producers
M. L. McGaughran
Advisory Panel for The Blues Society
Elizabeth Deane is a longtime writer, producer and director of documentary films for PBS, specializing in American history. Based at WGBH, public media in Boston, Deane was co-creator and executive producer of the 1995 PBS series Rock & Roll, a co-production of WGBH and the BBC. The ten-part history, with Memphis Country Blues Society co-founder Robert Palmer as chief consultant, was described by The New York Times as “as good as television gets”. Rock & Roll won the Peabody Award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Programming and was nominated for an Emmy and for the BAFTA, Britain’s most prestigious television award. Deane’s other works include Latin Music USA, and many multi-episode programs she co-wrote, directed, produced and/or executive produced for the PBS history series American Experience. Her awards include four George Foster Peabody Awards, two Emmy nominations, a Writers Guild Award and two Writers Guild nominations, and two Erik Barnouw Awards from the Organization of American Historians.
Tim Duffy is the co-founder and chief executive of the Music Maker Relief Foundation. For decades, Tim and the foundation have provided for musicians’ basic needs, guided their careers, and documenting their lives in stunning photographs. In the 22 years since its founding, Tim—along with his wife and Managing Director, Denise, and their dedicated team—have assisted and partnered with over 300 artists, issued over 150 CDs, and reached over a million people with live performance in over 40 states and 17 countries around the globe. Tim has been recognized by the ABC Evening News as “Person of the Week,” and has been featured in stories by Time, NPR, CBS, PBS and several local media outlets. Photography has been at the heart of Tim Duffy’s Music Maker journey. Using technology from the 1870s, Tim’s wet plate portraits transport viewers into the space of the living past that he has worked so hard to preserve. Some of his plates have become part of the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum of African American Culture and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
William Ferris is a professor of history at UNC–Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore. He is associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and is widely recognized as a leader in Southern studies, African-American music and folklore. He is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prior to his role at NEH, Ferris served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he was a faculty member for 18 years. Ferris has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Pulitzer Prize nominee Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (UNC Press, 1989), which contains entries on every aspect of Southern culture and is widely recognized as a major reference work linking popular, folk, and academic cultures.
Dom Flemons is GRAMMY Award Winner, Two-Time EMMY Nominee, and 2019 WAMMIE Award Winner originally from Phoenix, Arizona and currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He is known as “The American Songster” since his repertoire of music covers over 100 years of American folklore, ballads, and tunes. He co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005 and his most recent solo album is the award-winning 2018 Folkways release “Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys”. Flemons is a music scholar, historian, record collector, and a multi-instrumentalist. He is considered an expert player on the Banjo, Fife, Guitar, Harmonica, Jug, Percussion, Quills, and Rhythm Bones. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Folk Alliance International, Music Maker Relief Foundation and as an Advisor to the Washington, D.C Chapter of the Recording Academy.
Holly George-Warren is a two-time Grammy nominee and the award-winning author of sixteen books, including the New York Times bestseller The Road to Woodstock (with Michael Lang) and the biographies A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton and Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly. George-Warren serves on the nominating committee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and teaches at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Robert Gordon is a writer and filmmaker. His film work includes producing and directing the documentaries Johnny Cash’s America and William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton. His Best of Enemies, about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, won an Emmy in 2017 and was shortlisted for an Oscar. His books include It Came from Memphis, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. His most recent is Memphis Rent Party. He won a Grammy for his liner notes to the Big Star boxed set Keep an Eye on the Sky. Gordon lives in Memphis.
Peter Guralnick has been called "a national resource" by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country’s intertwined black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. He won a Grammy for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club and wrote and coproduced the documentary Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll as well as writing the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. His most recently published book, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, was a finalist for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year, awarded by the Biographers International Organization.
Jamey Hatley is a Memphian obsessed with stories in ruin, at the very edge of being forgotten. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Memphis Noir, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a Prose Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award Winner, and the Indie Memphis Black Screenwriting Fellow (selected by Barry Jenkins). She wrote, directed, and produced a short film based on her story-essay, “Always Open, The Eureka Hotel.” She is also at work on a feature screenplay and a novel. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America, East.
Jeff Place has been at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections since 1988. He holds an MLS from the University of Maryland and specializes in sound archives. He oversees the cataloging of the Center's collections and has been involved in the compilation of almost sixty CDs of American music for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings including the Lead Belly Legacy Series, Lead Belly Sings for Children; the Pete Seeger American Favorite Ballads series; and The Asch Recordings (Woody Guthrie). Place has been nominated for six GRAMMY Awards and twelve Indie Awards, winning two GRAMMYs and six Indies. He was one of the producers and writers of the acclaimed 1997 edition of the Anthology of American Folk Music and The Best of Broadside, 1962-1988 (2000). He has served on the curatorial team for a number of exhibitions including the traveling Woody Guthrie exhibition This Land is Your Land. In 2003, he co-curated the Smithsonian Folklife Festival program on Appalachian culture. In 2012, he is produced and co-authored (with Robert Santelli) the publication and CD-box set Woody at 100 and the Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Collection in 2014.