After a lifetime dedicated to folk music and folklore, Dr. Ellen Stekert—an influential yet often unsung figure of the 1960s folk revival—will release her first independent album, Go Around Songs, Vol. 1, on March 28th. It will be streaming on all platforms. At 89 years old, Stekert is finally bringing her archival recordings to the public, marking a milestone moment in folk music history.

Check this space on Friday for links to hear the new music! In the meantime, visit the music section of this website to catch up on the other new singles we’ve been releasing over the past couple of months, as well as a few tunes from Ellen’s earlier recording career.

Stekert, a contemporary of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Dave Van Ronk, eventually chose to pursue academia instead of becoming a touring performer. However, her influence in the folk world was undeniable, as a singer, scholar, and folksong collector. Dylan references her in his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, remembering her work as an important part of how he learned to be a folksinger. She was also friends with folk legends Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, the Seeger family, and many others. In fact, after attending one of her concerts in 1964, Dylan invited her to a party—an invitation she declined due to teaching responsibilities the next morning.

The road to Go Around Songs began in 2020 when Stekert, after retiring as a folklore professor at the University of Minnesota, started digitizing her vast archive of recordings. “Until I started to do my own
digitizing, frankly, I didn’t think I was a good singer”, Stekert recalls. “It was like meeting yourself walking
down the street. I do think I had a really good voice. And I just like to use it. I love to sing; I knew I could
give something to people that way.”

The final push came in 2024 when she met 25-year-old folk musician and producer Ross Wylde through an unexpected encounter on eBay. Wylde, a longtime admirer of her work, was thrilled to discover that Stekert wanted to compile an album. Using cutting-edge AI technology, Wylde remixed and mastered 10 songs recorded between 1954 and 1980, separating vocal and guitar stems from mono recordings to enhance their clarity.

“Ellen’s recorded work is the perfect candidate for this technology,” Wylde explains. “For example, some of these tracks were drowned out by the guitar due to microphone placement, but AI has allowed us to rebalance and elevate them. It’s like science fiction.”

Go Around Songs will bring to life the music of one of the few veterans of the folk revival genre, offering a rare glimpse into an era that shaped American music history. As Stekert puts it, “I didn’t write songs; I gave them another kind of life so that they would communicate with someone else. The song will talk for itself, but I can give it a new audience and a new life.”

Ellen just released her first EP!

Live at Walker Art Center (1975) consists of two songs from a live concert Ellen performed solo with guitar at the world-famous art museum in Minneapolis.

“The Trees They Do Grow High,” a traditional ballad, is a sad romantic tale about true love and loss. “The Walker Outside” is a topical song written by the legendary Malvina Reynolds, a good friend of Ellen’s.

Have a listen at the Bandcamp link below:

“Live at Walker Art Center” is available on streaming platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and iHeart Radio by following this link to Ellen’s DistroKid page. To purchase a download of the EP, visit Ellen’s BandCamp page at ellenstekert.bandcamp.com. For updates about further new releases, please follow Ellen’s Spotify or Apple Music profiles, or check back on the Music & Performing page here at her website. Also, follow @ellenstekert on Instagram for updates and interesting stories about Ellen’s life.

Lyrics

“The Walker Outside”

I am under the sky
I’m the one passing by
You don’t hear me or see me
I’m a flicker of night
But your dreams, they’re uneasy
‘Cause I’m walking outside

My home’s on my back
My bed’s in my pack
Oh, you cozy quilt sleepers
Your mattress is wide
But your dreams, they’re uneasy
‘Cause I’m walking outside

I am thin and athirst
To the depths of my soul
To the depths of my soul
But my brain, it can reach you
And my hands, they can touch you
And my fingers are cold

I am under the sky
I’m the one passing by
You don’t hear me or see me
I’m a flicker of night
But your dreams, they’re uneasy
‘Cause I’m walking outside

“The Trees They Do Grow High”

Now the trees they do grow high, and the leaves they do grow green
And many a day and night have past that you and I have seen
The winter nights are coming on, and I must lie alone
He’s my bonny boy. He’s young, but he’s growin’

“Oh father, dearest father, I fear you’ve done me harm
For you’ve married me to a bonny boy, and he being so very young
Why he being only sixteen years, and I being twenty-one
He’s my bonny boy. He’s young, but he’s growin’”

“Oh daughter, dearest daughter, don’t mind what people say
For he will be a man to you when you are old and grey
And he will be a man to you when I am dead and gone
He’s your bonny boy. He’s young, but he’s growin'”

“Now we’ll send him to the college for one year or two
And then perhaps with time my love, a man he will grow
And all around his college cap, we will tie a ribbon blue
For to let the ladies know that he’s married”

As I walked out the other night beside the college wall
‘Twas there I spied my own true love playing at the ball
And there I spied my own true love, the fairest of them all
He’s my bonny boy. He’s young, but a-growin’

At the age of sixteen he was a married man
And at the age of seventeen, why the father of a son
And at the age of eighteen years, on his grave, the grass grew green
Cruel death had put an end to his growin’

Now I’ll sew my love a shroud of the Holland, oh so fine
And every stitch that I’ll take in it, why the tears come trickling down
And I will sit and mourn his fate until the day I die
As I’ll watch over his child while it’s growin’

Oh, now my love is dead, and in his grave does lie
The green grass that’s over him, why it groweth up so high
Oh, once I had an own true love, but now I have got none
He’s my bonny boy. He’s young, but a-growin’

So come all you pretty fair maids. A warning, take thy head
And never build your nest in the top of any tree
For the green leaves will wither down and the roots will decay
And the blushes of your young love will soon fade away

Credits

Released February 24, 2025

Perfomer: Ellen Stekert
Producer: Ross Wylde
Production Assistant: Bates Detwiler
Editorial & Publicity Manager: Christopher Bahn

This beautiful rendition of Bob Dylan’s classic was recorded at Wayne State University in 1968. The album cover photograph, by Patricia Clay, was taken at the same venue.

“Tomorrow is a Long Time” is available on streaming platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and iHeart Radio by following this link to Ellen’s DistroKid page. To purchase a download of “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” visit Ellen’s BandCamp page at ellenstekert.bandcamp.com. For updates about further new releases, please follow Ellen’s Spotify or Apple Music profiles, or check back on the Music & Performing page here at her website. Also, follow @ellenstekert on Instagram for updates and interesting stories about Ellen’s life.

Lyrics

If today was not a crooked highway
If tonight were not such a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all
Only if my own true love was near me
And if I could hear his heart softly pounding
Only if I were lying by him
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

Now there’s beauty in the silver, singing river
And there’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky
But nothing on Earth can ever match the beauty
That I remember in my true love’s eyes
Only if my own true love was near me
And if I could hear his heart softly pounding
Only if I were lying by him
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

I can’t see my reflection in the water
I can’t call the sound that knows no pain
I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps
And I don’t remember the sound of my own name
Only if my own true love was near me
And if I could hear his heart softly pounding
Only if I were lying by him
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

Credits

Released February 14, 2025
Perfomer: Ellen Stekert
Composer: Bob Dylan
Producer: Ross Wylde
Production Assistant: Bates Detwiler
Editorial & Publicity Manager: Christopher Bahn
Album Art Photographer: Patricia Clay

Hot on the heels of the debut of Ellen’s first archival release, “Went To the Sea,” we are happy to share another new tune—well, not new, but vintage and never-before-heard, newly remastered for your listening pleasure. “Free Goodwill” was recorded at a rehearsal in 1968. As far as Ellen and her team are aware, this is the only known recording of this arrangement. 

Ellen writes about the history of the song and her performance of it below, but please give a listen to the Bandcamp link first:

“Free Goodwill” is available on streaming platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and iHeart Radio by following this link to Ellen’s DistroKid page. To purchase a download of “Went To the Sea,” visit Ellen’s BandCamp page at ellenstekert.bandcamp.com. For updates about further new releases, please follow Ellen’s Spotify or Apple Music profiles, or check back on the Music & Performing page here at her website. Also, follow @ellenstekert on Instagram for updates and interesting stories about Ellen’s life.

About the song

Ellen writes: “I first ran across this lyric in Cecil Sharp’s 1918 collection of Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Volume II, p. 269). Sharp titled it ‘I Love my Love’. Interestingly, he makes no reference to other versions of the song, nor does Alan Lomax in his later collection, The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (1946, p. 45), where Lomax actually only reprints the Sharp version.

“This version of the song ‘Sharp Prints’, which he attributes to a Mrs. Ellen Webb of North Carolina, is a small gem with a lyrical flowing melody and austere poignant verses that contain numerous floating phrases from British lyric tradition. I found the song sometime in the 1950s and sang it in programs numerous times. I even sent a recorded rendition that I did of it to a well-known performer in the 1970s, but nowhere else did I find versions of it.

“The trail of tradition for this song was invisible to me and as I finished my studies and gained a Ph.D. never finding a trace of it, I began to think that Cecil Sharp may have composed it himself and slipped it into his marvelous collection of songs. However, now I favor the theory that Mrs. Ellen Webb might well have composed the song herself or at least creatively chose to perpetuate it by singing it for Sharp. (The people in the mountains realized that Cecil Sharp was there to collect songs and ‘preserve’ them.)

“The words Ellen Webb sings, as found in the Southern Mountain collection, are those of a lover who declares love for a woman. Now, It is not unusual for women singers in the Anglo-American tradition to sing songs in which a man is the protagonist, or for men to sing songs in which a woman is the voice in the text. However, in this case, where ‘All my friends fell out with me because I kept my love’s company,’ the song might well be speaking of a same-sex relationship, which would have accounted for the ‘I’ of the song having ‘fallen out’ of the company of her peers. Indeed, in the early 1900s in the Appalachians, such a same-sex relationship would have been taboo, I would venture that this might well be one of the few cases of a lyric being collected by Cecil Sharp that speaks of same-sex love.

“Interestingly, when I sang the song, as you hear it now from the early 1960s, I changed Ellen Webb’s pronouns and sang it as though it were being sung to a male lover. The concert culture to which I performed never noted my ‘closet version’ (as I call it today), and the beauty of the melody and the text still conveyed the intensity of the piece, regardless of who wrote it for whom…which is how I hope it will be heard today.”

Lyrics

All my friends fell out with me
Because I kept my love’s company
But let them say or do what they will
I love my love with a free goodwill

Over the mountain, I must go
Because my fortune is so low
With an aching heart and a troubled mind
For leaving my true love behind

The moon above looks down and see
The parting of true love and me
It’s as hard to part the moon and sky
As it is to part true love and I

When I have gold, he has his part
When I have none, he has my heart
And he won it too with a free goodwill
And upon my honor, I love him still

The winter’s passed, and the summer’s come
The trees are blooming one by one
And if my true love chooses for to stay
I’ll stay with him ’till the break of day

For all my friends fell out with me
Because I kept my love’s company
But let them say or do what they will
I love my love with a free goodwill

Credits

Released January 31, 2025
Perfomer: Ellen Stekert
Composer: Traditional
Producer: Ross Wylde
Production Assistant: Bates Detwiler 
Editorial & Publicity Manager: Christopher Bahn