Highlight: 35th Anniversary

April 25th, 2009

About the Festival - Artists and Performers - Sponsors - Vendors - Friends of the Festival
Awards Recognition

Elizabeth Hance — Honorary Chair

Ms. Hance, President and CEO, has been with Magyar Bank for over 35 years. Her passion for community banking extends far beyond her professional responsibilities. Today, she is affiliated with numerous organizations that share her same commitment to the community and serves on the Board of Directors for six local organizations. Ms. Hance is actively involved in several professional organizations and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of New Jersey Bankers, the Banking industry’s state trade organization. Ms. Hance was the recipient of the 2007 New Jersey’s 50 Best Women in Business award presented by NJ Biz, and the 2006 Community Leaders of Distinction award presented by the Middlesex County Regional Chamber of Commerce.

https://www.magbank.com/home/home


Harriet Davidson — Grand Marshall

Professor Harriet Davidson, Interim Dean of Douglass Residential College and the Douglass Campus, is a tenured member of the SAS Departments of English and Women’s and Gender Studies and of the Program in Comparative Literature. Professor Davidson is a widely recognized scholar-critic working in literary modernism, contemporary poetry, and feminist theory. A celebrated teacher, she has also been one of the most active members of the university community, especially for the Department of English, Women’s Studies, and Douglass College. Her teaching has earned her Rutgers’ top awards: the Warren Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Graduate School Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Professor Davidson has also been an inexhaustible campus leader, serving on numerous University and Douglass committees and most recently directing the Department of English’s undergraduate Honors Program.

http://drc.rutgers.edu/index.php?page_name=deans_biography


Jean Ritchie — Lifetime Achievement

Jean Ritchie is a traditional musician by virtue of her life and works, but she is also a commercial performer, author, recording artist, composer, and folk music collector. She was born in 1922 in Viper, Kentucky, into a family that considered music extremely important. In addition to singing as a means of entertainment, they had songs to accompany nearly all of their activities, from sweeping to churning to working in the fields. Besides the songs of family and friends, she was exposed to the music of the Old Regular Baptist church meetings the family attended regularly and to popular culture, particularly radio and recording. It is interesting to note that the one thing absent from Ritchie’s musical background is formal training. One of the most interesting aspects of Ritchie’s career is her own songwriting. Her Uncle Jason’s practice of altering tunes from one verse to another in a song, and lyrics from one performance to the next, taught Ritchie to accept improvisation and variation as natural elements of traditional music. Along with singing, Ritchie grew up playing a little-known instrument called the dulcimer. She is responsible for what is commonly known as the "dulcimer revival," having performed and recorded extensively with the instrument. She also published the instrument's first major instruction and repertoire book (1963).

Ritchie attended Cumberland Junior College in Williamsburg, Kentucky, as well as the University of Kentucky, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1946. With a bachelor’s degree in social work, she moved to New York City to work at the Henry Street Settlement. Ritchie has played and sung on radio and television, in concerts, and at folk festivals and hootenannies in the U.S. and abroad. Her album None But One won the Rolling Stone Critics’ Award in 1977. She returns to perform at the New Jersey Folk Festival following the awards ceremony.
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