Faculty
2025 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.
Midnight on the Water
Midnight on the Water started as an idea. Nathan Bishop, Tom Krumm, and Dani Hawkins have collectively played well over one thousand performances with classical, jazz, trad, and pop ensembles, and in those engagements they have met a lot of crossover artists: classical musicians who play arrangements of pop songs, or trad musicians who dabble in jazz. But the trio never really met other string players who are equally at home across all those musical contexts – until they met one another! What would happen, they thought, if the three of them got together to play ALL the music in a single ensemble? After about a year of musical exploration and rehearsal, they are pretty excited about the results. All that’s missing is the most important part: you, our audience!
Jerry Zolten
Jerry Zolten is from the gritty Pennsylvania steel mill town of McKeesport just southeast of Pittsburgh where he came up listening to urban R&B, gospel, and jazz. As an undergrad at Penn State, he was president of the Penn State Folklore Society and mentored by renowned folklorist Samuel Bayard, experiences that influenced him to write about and become a performer in roots music genres including folk, Western swing, and blues. His creative output includes a multitude of concert and event productions, album liner-notes writing, producing and appearing in documentary films, authoring books and articles, producing, narrating, and guesting on NPR radio programs, teaching and publicly presenting, and performing on and producing musical albums. He currently performs in the eight-piece soul/R&B band Code: Blue and as half of The Jive Bombers with his musical accomplice for close to fifty years, Richard Sleigh.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Diana Wagner
Based in the woods near Salisbury, MD, multi-instrumentalist Diana Wagner is a sought-after Eastern Shore musician who has performed at dozens of venues locally and in the mid-Atlantic region. Diana is a song catcher, acoustic musician, and accidental composer who preserves and shares contemporary, historic, and traditional folk and blues music. As a collector and performer of local and regional music, Diana especially seeks to give voice to our musical traditions and tell the narratives behind the songs. In 2008, Diana released her CD, Tradition Bearer. Diana also created and hosted the weekly radio program “Chesapeake Folk” on WBYC Community Radio in Crisfield, MD, for the Chesapeake Community Radio Network. Diana retired in 2024 from Salisbury University and is now a volunteer therapeutic musician, bringing music to the bedsides of hospice patients and their families.
Cathy Petrissans
Cathy Petrissans sings three-part harmony in the California-based Basque-American NOKA trio. Singing in the endangered Basque language, NOKA has released four albums, has toured internationally, and was interviewed on NPR. In Clarion PA, she adds melodica, harmonium, and bass to Celtic music performed by the four women who make up Keridwyn. Cathy’s musical highlights include singing at the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, and at the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival. She has performed and recorded with Basque Grammy Award-winning accordionist Kepa Junkera and recently enjoyed adding vocals to a recorded single with Simple Gifts.
Peggy Shutes Kaiser
Peggy Kaiser, from York, PA is a retired music teacher and in addition to the piano, she plays the Appalachian mountain dulcimer. An experienced clinician, Peggy has taught workshops at Folk College, The Greenwood Furnace Folk Gathering, HOTAfest, Penn State University, and the Pennsylvania Music Educator’s Annual Conference. Peggy provides piano rhythms for dances with her husband, Ryck, in Contra Intuitive and with Bruce Young in Smash the Windows.
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.
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.
Bob Nicholson
Based in Syracuse, NY, Bob is in demand as a contra and square dance caller who is 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.