Faculty
2026 Faculty
Simple Gifts
Folk Gathering’s host band is two women (Linda Littleton and Karen Hirshon) playing twelve instruments, performing styles that range from old time to Celtic to Klezmer and beyond. Combining tradition with innovation, Simple Gifts creates some of the finest arrangements in folk music today: swing fiddle creeps into a Romanian dance, spoons show up in an Irish reel, and the concertina ventures far beyond styles considered traditional for that instrument. Based in the hills of Central Pennsylvania, Simple Gifts switches with ease among two violins, concertina, mandolin, banjolin, recorders, bowed psaltery, hammered dulcimer, baritone fiddle, guitar, piano, and percussion.
Box & String
They also perform as a Trio with Laura Alexander on cello.
Laura Alexander
Laura Alexander has been a Folk College and Greenwood Furnace camper since 2018, and instantly felt at home in this uniquely welcoming community. She started playing cello in school orchestra, and now enjoys playing for contra, English and French folk dances in the Philadelphia area and beyond. She frequently plays for farmers’ markets and dances with Bill Quern and Sarah Gowan as Box & String Trio. She is an active contra dance organizer and always looking for opportunities to spread the joy of participatory music and dance. When not playing music, she’s a chemist with the PA Bureau of Labs.
Jay Best
Mark Twain said, “When you want genuine music — music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, — when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!”
Jay Best has invoked the “glory-beaming banjo” for decades and has explored a wide variety of “genuine music” including old-time, folk, and blues. Jay leads a fiddle-mentoring group at the Confluence Creative Arts Center and performed on and produced the community CD Confluence: Coming Together. He loves playing banjo, guitar, and fiddle with friends and family, but his magnum opus was a recording made with a steel guitar tuned like a banjo and performed with cicadas at twilight.
Holly Foy
You may know Holly from Folk College emceeing the Folk College Sunday Student Band Concert. You may know her as the one who brings flamingoes to the Folk Gathering or as the contradance band leader from 2019, 2022 and 2024. You might not know that she began attending Folk College in 2001, began assisting Linda Littleton with the hiring of musicians in 2005, and has been helping to organize both festivals ever since. When not wrangling musicians, she sometimes dabbles herself. She plays guitar and bouzouki in the Celtic band Callanish since 2010 and is also a member of the Celtic Nations Band.
Christy Gross (Christy Lou)
Christy Lou is a multi-instrumentalist from the greater Philadelphia area and has played folk music for as long as she can remember. She began playing acoustic guitar at age ten and has had a steady stream of opportunities to play from that time forward. She has been a student at Folk College and is excited to join the faculty of the PAFolk Gathering this year. Many years ago, Christy’s husband surprised her with a banjo, and the rest is history. She quickly fell in love with clawhammer banjo and has studied with Allison DeGroot, Adam Hurt, Joe Newberry, and many other modern masters of clawhammer banjo. She taught clawhammer banjo and beginning fiddle at Bucks County Folk Music Shop and currently hosts the Phoenixville Old Time Jam. Christy is a creator of community and loves to host house concerts, jams, and other opportunities to connect people with music. She is co-founder of several folk bands, including Cornflower Jam, Pickle Creek, and The Station Mashers. Christy loves writing music (particularly on banjo) and spearheaded the production of a Pennsylvania-based folk album which includes the playing of our own Rachel Hall and Laura Alexander.
Urie Kline
A classically-trained American percussionist, Urie seeks to study percussion in its entirety. This quest has lead him around the world, both musically and literally. Claiming teachers from several traditions and with field trips to Japan and Hawai’i, Urie is a practitioner of the drumset, taiko, percussion of the African diaspora–Guinea, Cuba, Peru–and the Middle East, as well as contemporary solo and chamber works. Based in the Williamsport Area, he is a member of the Cadillac Cats (blues), Groove Chapel (funk and soul), Aaron Kelly (country), and the Northern Appalachian Wind Symphony. Additionally, he has performed with IBC competitor Ann Kerstetter, the Williamsport Symphony Orchestra, the Lycoming College Choirs, and the Jubilate Choir. Urie is also the musical director of Lyco Taiko–a school of Japanese drumming–and the Latin jazz/salsa combo Los Gatos Gordos. He lives in Muncy, Pennsylvania.
Henry Koretzky
Henry Koretzky is a mandolinist/guitarist/singer from Harrisburg, PA, who has performed in a wide variety of styles and groups, from bluegrass with Cornerstone, Sweetwater Reunion, and High Strung, klezmer with The Old World Folk Band, old-time with the duo Rootbound, as well as swing, Celtic, contemporary folk, and contradance music. He has taught at Folk College in previous years by himself, as part of The Keystone Rebels and as part of a duo with singer/songwriter/ guitarist Kevin Neidig. He has also been a staff regular at both Folk College and the Pennsylvania Folk Gathering.
John Krumm
John Krumm has been performing traditional and vintage music for over 55 years. A favorite teacher at Folk events in the US, Canada and Europe, like Ashoken Camps, John teaches Voice, Guitar, Piano, Fiddle, Mandolin, Banjo, Bass, Recorder, and others. He is best known as a caller of square and contra dance, but also has an international reputation as a composer of rounds.
John sees American traditional dance at its best as an expression of the individual in the context of a caring and creative community, and as a celebration of our ability to enter into such communities as we make our way through a fast-changing world. In his dance teaching he draws on his experiences with the dances and children’s games of the U.S.A., Quebec, and the British Isles to help contemporary communities express their “solidarity in diversity.” Yes, John is the father of Tom Krumm of the band Midnight on the Water.
Tom Krumm
Tom is a performer who specializes in versatility. He has logged performances with artists of every genre, ranging from Roseanne Cash to Jacob Collier to Aloe Blacc to Al Kooper, and many more. He is a member of Midnight on the Water, which has been part of Folk College the last few years, and at last year’s Pennsylvania Folk Gathering.
He’s also performed with the contra dance band Live Wire, the swing band Swingology, and as a ringer for concert and pit orchestras throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Most recently, he appeared as soloist alongside Grammy award-winning fiddler Jay Ungar and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in a performance his own original arrangement of Daybreak in the Mountains.
A graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music, Tom logged over 400 hours of studio and performance time during his studies. He particularly enjoyed exploring microtonal Arabic music, which he credits with removing a range of limitations from his playing.
Today, Tom exhibits an unusual capacity to play anything asked of him on violin, mandolin, and guitar in recording sessions and concerts across the east coast. His work as a educator includes teaching engagements at the Ashokan Music and Dance camps since the age of 17, and more recent work at the University of Pennsylvania and his own private teaching studio in Philadelphia.
Lynn Margileth
Lynn performs the joyful and transformative music of Kirtan, a form of devotional music rooted in Indian tradition. It combines mesmerizing mantra chants with uplifting melodies. Participants experience a sense of spiritual connection and inner peace through repetitive singing and rhythmic accompaniment. Kirtan sessions invite call-and-response singing, inviting participants to actively engage in the musical experience. She also leads chants from many world traditions including American Gospel, Tibetan Buddhist, Afro Cuban, Native American.
Lynn plays guitar, harmonium, ukulele, frame drums, and fiddle. She studied improvisation in Music for People, a program founded by David Darling. Lynn has studied with Jai Uttal and performed with Wah, two American masters of Kirtan. She performs with her husband, Ned Leavitt, at yoga centers in the United States and India. They have a chanting CD, Bhakti Treasure, available online!
Maddy Smith
Maddy Smith is a Philadelphia-based musician who plays in Cornflower Blue with Laura Alexander and Christy Lou Gross. Maddy grew up playing classical violin and was lured into the world of folk music when she discovered Sacred Harp singing in a college American music history class. This was a slippery slope; one thing led to another, and she is now an avid old-time fiddle/banjo/guitar player, contra dancer, and dance musician, playing with contra band Filament and in addition to Cornflower Jam. She holds a music education degree from the University of Central Florida and spends her weekdays teaching Pre-K-5th grade music at Plymouth Meeting Friends School.
Diana Wagner
Diana Wagner is an acoustic musician on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, performing traditional folk and blues, liturgical music, and therapeutic music.
Starting as an attendee at both Folk College and Pennsylvania Folk Gathering, Diana has become a member of the faculty of both events.
Bob Nicholson
Based in Syracuse, NY, Bob is in demand as a contra and square dance caller, known for his relaxed teaching style, patience, energy, and ability to make the dance fun! Bob is our favorite caller and a regular at both Folk College and the Pennsylvania Folk Gathering.