The Creek Rocks Return from the Ozarks because the Library of Congress’ Artists in Resonance

When Mark Bilyeu and Cindy Woolf walked into the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium, it wasn’t the primary time the musical duo carried out on the nationwide stage.

Known because the Creek Rocks, the folk-music duo got here to Washington, D.C., for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a part of this system centered on the Ozarks. For two weeks, they sang songs of the Midwest area with listeners on the National Mall. Nor have been they the primary to sing a lot of the songs they shared, tunes handed down by generations and a few from locations removed from the Ozarks.

This time, they have been the primary: the primary Artists in Resonance, a fellowship launched by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. This honor is what led them to the stage on August 21, 2025.

“They are fantastic singers, songwriters, arrangers, and performers and have released albums of traditional and original material, including songs sourced from other archives,” stated Jennifer Cutting, folklife specialist with the Library of Congress, as she opened the live performance. “We’re delighted to be the very first audience to hear the fruits of their research at the American Folklife Center. ”

Over the course of an hour, Bilyeu and Woolf shared songs like “Barbara Allen,” and “Red River Shore,” legacy ballads telling the story of troubled love. Applause echoed by the auditorium, bringing a standing ovation.

“It’s very exciting,” Woolf stated. “It’s an honor to be asked to perform here. Walking through the building, seeing our picture everywhere, is just kind of unreal. I would say it’s life-affirming.”

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Setting the Stage for the Fellowship

In a approach, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival performed a job in connecting Bilyeu and Woolf with the fellowship they finally acquired.

They took time whereas in D.C. for the Festival to go to the American Folklife Center, a studying room on the Library of Congress that, as its web site notes, “documents and shares the many expressions of human experience to inspire, revitalize, and perpetuate living cultural traditions.”

There, along with exploring papers from people like famous folklorist Vance Randolph, the duo seen supplies that solidified a private reference to the collections. 

“Right off the bat, it started out with a song that my grandma used to sing,” Bilyeu recalled of a presentation they seen. “The enormity of the moment of where we were, and all the cool stuff we were around, and then hearing that voice come through—essentially singing this same song as my grandmother… I got a little misty. Just a little misty about the whole thing.”

That preliminary go to led to their utility for the fellowship, which is deliberate as an annual honor to “to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the American Folklife Center Archives.”

It was funded by a bequest from the late Mike Rivers, a people musician and engineer who was a member of Pete Seeger’s very first Clearwater Sloop crew.

“What Mike Rivers wanted was to facilitate artists getting into the collections and coming out with something new, in the sense that it’s a reinterpretation; the reimagination of the material,” stated John Fenn, head of analysis and applications at AFC. “[Bilyeu and Woolf’s] project was competitive in my mind from the beginning out of the twenty or so we received that year. It was the spirit, the practicality, and the passion for the content.” 

Months of anxiously awaiting the information paid off ultimately.

“It was the best news we’d ever gotten,” Woolf stated.

Focus of the Fellowship and Its Reverberating Impact

The couple traveled to D.C. in 2024 to conduct analysis within the AFC archives, which centered on the work of Sidney Robertson Cowell.

In the Nineteen Thirties, Cowell collected people music for the Resettlement Administration in D.C., recording native musicians on a new-to-the-time transportable sound recording machine. The effort launched her to Ozarks musicians in Arkansas, and people tunes captured Bilyeu and Woolf’s ears. 

“It’s really cool to be part of the journey of these folk songs,” Woolf stated, talking to the evolution of songs by the individuals who share them. “[Cowell] stated herself that folks music is a dwelling, respiration, continuously evolving factor that’s handed from one individual to the subsequent and never essentially written down. In reality, she stated, ‘When a song is written down, it’s trapped like a fly in amber.’

“I don’t mind messing around with them and changing them to suit us and how we would like to perform them,” Woolf continued, sharing a tune referred to as “Young Charlotte” that was recorded by a number of Ozarkers within the assortment. “I just kind of took them all and pieced together the parts that I liked from each performance, and came up with our own.”

Both generational Ozarkers, Woolf and Bilyeu signify a spectrum of Ozarks tradition. Woolf hails from Arkansas and commenced her musical journey with piano. It was when she moved to Springfield, Missouri, for faculty that an curiosity in people and bluegrass started, main her to in the end write her personal songs, too.

The Bilyeu identify reverberates by the Ozarks, the place the household represents generations of musical heritage. In newer instances, that’s come to the public consciousness by Big Smith, an uber-popular regional band that revived for a live performance on the 2023 Festival.

The musicians met in 2002, grew to become musical collaborators, and in the end married. They’ve been performing because the Creek Rocks for a couple of decade.

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“I think, if we had a mission, part of that was that the record would just make people be aware of the collections if they might not have otherwise,” Bilyeu stated in 2020 of folk-music analysis the couple did for his or her first album. Titled Wolf Hunter, the album centered on recordings collected by folklorists John Quincy Wolf —no relation to Woolf—and Max Hunter. Like Cowell, Wolf and Hunter recorded people songs all through the area.

“I just like the idea of taking [this material] and having it live in the present,” Bilyeu stated.

This work fuels what comes subsequent: new curiosity, new imaginings, and new cultural moments. That will in the end shine by the Creek Rocks’ new album, to be launched within the coming months, that can spotlight songs they discovered by the fellowship.

“Part of our proposal for the fellowship was that the end result was not just making the album, but to bring the music back to Springfield and other communities,” Bilyeu stated. “So I simply need to emphasize that and say, ‘Get ready, Springfield.’

“If we can help increase people’s appreciation of their own heritage and make people more aware of what was going on with the music from back then, mission accomplished.”

Kaitlyn McConnell is the founding father of Ozarks Alive, a web based mission devoted to the documentation of native historical past and tradition. She was a part of the curatorial workforce for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region.