Elijah Wald is a musician, writer, and historian who has published on a broad range of music and related cultural subjects. He started playing guitar after seeing his first Pete Seeger concert at age seven, and spent many years traveling and performing in North and Central America, Europe, Asia and Africa. In the early 1980s, he began writing for the Boston Globe, first covering gospel and other “roots” styles, then becoming the regular “world music” reporter. Wald has an interdisciplinary PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics, has taught at UCLA, Boston College, and Temple University, and travels widely as a speaker on the history and culture of popular music. He is particularly known for exploring musical styles within broader sociocultural contexts, as well as for original research on early blues, Mexican ranchera, and the folk revival.
Wald has published well over a thousand articles in the Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and various magazines and journals, and his dozen books include Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music; Narcocorrido, a survey of the modern Mexican ballads of drug smuggling, migration, and political corruption; Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties; How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music; Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; and Dave Van Ronk’s memoir of the New York folk revival, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (the inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ movie, Inside Llewyn Davis). His awards include a 2002 Grammy for Best Album Notes, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, and special mention for the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey award.
Currently, Wald is working on a book about nationalism, migration, and borders; performing occasional concerts; and exploring his new hometown of Philadelphia. There is voluminous further information at his website: http://www.elijahwald.com.