At age 90, a singer, collector, and scholar of folk music goes digital
By |
Melissa Newcomb
,
Cornellians
At age 13, lying in a hospital bed recovering from polio, Ellen Stekert ’57 borrowed her older brother’s guitar and learned to play to pass the time. It would lead to a decades-long career—not only in music but in academia.
Stekert is a veteran folk singer who has released several albums and performed widely; she’s also a collector and curator of folk music and a scholar who has advanced the teaching of folklore studies.
“To me, a folk song is an expression of a person,” says Stekert, a professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota.
“Folk songs are handed down—but the person singing it chooses that song, and sings it in ways that express themselves.”
Although Stekert no longer sings publicly due to surgery that impacted her vocal cords—she jokes, however, that she “can still talk your ear off”—she’s currently digitizing and releasing recordings from her vast archive, much of which has not been made public before.
In spring 2025, she released Go Around Songs, Vol. 1, her first new album in 67 years, using a technology that musicians could have scarcely imagined back when her last one came out: the Bandcamp website.
