McKissick Museum's Punk & Old-Time Radio Show returns this week with special guest Thomas Grant Richardson. Thomas is an independent folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and traditional arts consultant based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Before becoming a freelancer, he was the Curator of Education at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol VA/TN. Since then, he has worked across the country for various cultural organizations, including the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oregon Folklife Network, Missouri Folk Arts Program, New Mexico Arts, Utah Division of Arts and Museums, Iowa Arts Council, The Association for Cultural Equity, The American Folklore Society, and PBS Education. He holds a Master's Degree in Ethnomusicology and a Ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University.
Thomas is a highly requested lecturer and workshop leader. He has spoken to students at numerous undergraduate and graduate classes across the country, guest lectured at Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, AZ, led workshops at Ohio State University and the American Folklore Society. In 2018 Thomas was a Frontier Fellow with The Epicenter of Green River Utah where he taught audio recording and interview techniques to rural high school students. In 2019 he returned to rural Utah on a Delmont R. Oswald Fellowship for Utah Studies from Utah Humanities to conduct oral histories of melon-growing families. In addition to all this, Thomas has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork throughout the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Norway, while consulting for the Vermont Folklife Center, New Mexico Arts, and the Utah Folk Arts Program. His current projects include launching a podcast for the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
Punk & Old-Time: Conversations on Community, Conflict, and Cohesion airs weekly on WUSC Radio (90.5 FM), Thursdays at 2:00pm EDT. Every week through April, Folklife Program Coordinator Ian Hallagan will talk with individuals situated in both the Punk and Old-Time communities about their experiences at the intersection of what most people would regard as two separate musical genres.