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Joe Hickerson was born Joseph Charles Hickerson, on 20 October 1935, in Lake Forest, Illinois, but grew up mostly in Connecticut, including New Haven.
Joe's mother often played the piano and sang folk songs with him and his older brother Jay, instilling in him and his sibling a love of traditional music. His father served as a teacher and principal, later becoming Director of Training Schools and Chairman of the Education Department at the New Haven State Teachers College (now Southern Connecticut State College). As a boy, Joe sang in church choirs and learned to play guitar after his parents encouraged lessons, gifting him a small ukulele and later a Mexican guitar that once belonged to his grandmother.
Joe studied physics at Oberlin College, earning his B.S. in 1957, and there he performed folk music with a group called The Folksmiths. He also became the first president of Oberlin’s Folk Song Club, and helped organise the first Oberlin Folk Festival]. He went on to graduate school in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington, where he completed a master’s degree - including an annotated bibliography of North American Indian music - and began work toward a doctorate before taking a position at the Library of Congress.
His own career in folk music included significant creative contributions: in 1958 he recorded, with the Folksmiths, the first LP version of “Kumbayah,” drawing on a version he learned from Tony Saletan, and in 1960 he added two verses to Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”. In that same year, collaborating with Dave Guard, he helped shape the Kingston Trio’s version of “Bonny Hielan’ Laddie”.
In June 1963 he joined the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song, later the American Folklife Center, where he worked for thirty-five years as librarian, director, archivist, and song-finder before retiring in 1998. He continued lecturing, writing, performing, and contributing to folk-music scholarship well beyond his retirement.
Joe recorded several albums, including We’ve Got Some Singing to Do (1958) with the Folksmiths, Joe Hickerson With a Gathering of Friends (1970), and Drive Dull Care Away Volumes 1 and 2 (1976). He also appeared as a performer on the 1979 film The Wobblies.
Joe Hickerson possessed a quietly profound gift for unearthing, refining, and sharing folk songs. He never sought the limelight; instead, he listened deeply - to tradition, to the voices of the past, and to the communities that preserved them. His modest, direct singing and his insistence that folk songs belong to all of us, not the performer, lent his interpretations an authentic authority and timelessness. He had an uncanny ability to sense the living heart of a song in the field and bring it forward with grace and sensitivity, creating versions that could become embedded in the tradition.
His legacy in popular music lay not in chart-topping hits, but in shaping the canon of folk standards and preserving the sources from which later generations drew. By adding to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” he gave one of folk music’s most powerful protest songs its enduring form. By guiding archives for decades, he ensured that voices from America’s past would remain accessible. He embodied the role of the scholar-singer, bridging academic rigor and communal performance with humility. In the history of popular and folk music, he stands as a guardian of songs, a connector of traditions, and a musician who invited us not just to listen, but to sing along and carry the songs forward.
Joe Hickerson died at the age of 89, on the 17th August 2025, in Portland, Oregon, USA. of undisclosed causes.
The above is just one of the many profiles of leading songwriters, singers, musicians and music industry personnel, published by the International Songwriters Association and "Songwriter Magazine". Please click HERE for more.
© Jim Liddane
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