Jeff Warner

Jeff Warner

Jeff Warner is a folk singer from the United States whose work focuses on traditional songs, maritime material and other historic repertoire. He presents music associated with the everyday lives of 19th-century people, drawing on traditions from the Outer Banks fishing villages of North Carolina to the lumber camps of the Adirondack Mountains. His approach is historical as well as musical, and he describes his work as using traditional song to teach American history and culture.

Background and influences

Warner attributes his interest in both scholarship and performance to his parents, the music historians Frank and Anne Warner. As a child, he accompanies them on field trips across the eastern United States and Canada, listening while they record singers who remember older local songs. Those recordings are preserved in the Library of Congress. He grows up in Greenwich Village, later studies at Duke University, where he earns a BA in English, and then serves two years in the Navy. After that he continues his studies at New York University under the G.I. Bill.

Career

In the 1960s, Warner works as editor-in-training at Doubleday Bookclubs, initially moving toward a literary career. He then joins a non-profit music school, the Guitar Workshop in Roslyn, Long Island, after a friend asks for help. He stays there for nine years as the only paid staff member, working as administrator, guitar teacher, grant writer and community programme coordinator. He says he learns music theory and arrangement through teaching, and the role brings him into contact with important figures in the post-war folk revival.

In the 1970s he leaves to build a career in historical music. During the US Bicentennial period, he meets demand for American songs in schools through outreach programmes. He later moves to Portsmouth in 1997 and begins school outreach in New Hampshire as a roster artist for the State Arts Council. He also tours nationally with the Smithsonian Associates from 1979 to 1993.

Recordings and publications

Warner records for Flying Fish/Rounder and other labels. His first solo compact disc is Jolly Tinker, recorded in 2005 on Gumstump Records. His 1995 recording Two Little Boys receives a Parents’ Choice Award. He appears on the New Hampshire State Arts Council’s 2003 compact disc Songs of the Seasons and co-writes the liner notes.

He also edits Traditional American Folksongs from the Frank and Anne Warner Collection, published by Syracuse University Press in 1984, and produces the CD set Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still: The Warner Collection for Appleseed Recordings in 2000. Both publications present material collected by his parents. Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still uses the actual voices of singers born between 1860 and 1900, recorded by the Warners on early disc recorders.

Organisations and honours

Warner serves as Folklorist and Community Scholar for the New Hampshire Council on the Arts and is named a 2007 State Arts Council Fellow. He is past president of the Country Dance and Song Society, a past officer of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance, and a former producer of the Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival. He also works as an artist for the arts councils of Virginia, Ohio and Utah, and receives numerous grants from the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

Performance style

Warner presents songs with warmth, humour and understated scholarship, and his repertoire is described as having strong local history and a clear sense of place. He does not describe himself as a traditional singer in the strict academic sense, but as a singer of traditional songs, with an emphasis on the historical evidence carried by old songs and their role as living historical artefacts.