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
Box and String is the duo of Bill Quern and Sarah Gowan.
We play instrumental traditional roots music from the American Appalachians, England, Canada, Scandinavia, and France, as well as our original music composed in traditional styles. With a combined instrument collection that includes guitar, mandolin, concertina, melodeon, 4- and 5-string banjo, fiddle, harmonica, jaw harp, and foot percussion, we provide a varied and entertaining program.
We 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.
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. He is perhaps best known as a caller of square and contra dance, but he also has an international reputation as a composer of rounds. His musical compositions are for people I know and their situations and celebrations.
Besides being one of this year’s Pennsylvania Folk Gathering faculty, he is being honored as the 2026 Pennsylvania Heritage Musician.
He is also the father of Tom Krumm.
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!
Richard Sleigh
Richard has been exploring the harmonica from the inside out for over 35 years. He has performed with Taj Mahal, Maria Muldaur, Bo Diddley, Susan Werner, and many others. His studio work includes award winning films, TV, radio, and theatre soundtracks, and other projects. As a soloist, he combines his fluid and highly developed rack playing with soulful vocals, guitar, and intricate solo harp flights. Richard’s music is American roots – ranging from rural and urban blues, fiddle tunes, swing, country, gospel, to early rock and roll. He has three solo releases – “Steppin Out”, The Joliet Sessions”, and his most recent collection titled “Celtic Instrumentals”. You can also follow Richard on his blog.
Maddie Smith
TBD
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.