Richard K. Spottswood

Richard K. "Dick" Spottswood (born April 17, 1937) is an American musicologist and author from Maryland who has catalogued and been responsible for the reissue of many thousands of recordings of vernacular music in the United States.

Biography Spottswood was born in 1937 in Washington, D.C., where his father worked for The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. From an early age, he was interested in music with a particular interest in early jazz, country, blues, and gospel. When he was a teenager, around 1953 or 1954, he first heard a recording of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and immediately was attracted to bluegrass music.

Spottswood earned his B.A. from the University of Maryland in 1960, and his Master's degree in Library Science from Catholic University in 1962. The title of his Master's thesis was A catalog of American folk music on commercial recordings at the Library of Congress, 1923-1940. His masterwork, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893-1942 (University of Illinois Press, 1990), is a seven-volume listing of sound recordings by foreign language and minority groups issued in the U.S. until 1942. He also edited and annotated the 15-volume LP series Folk Music in America for the Library of Congress, and contributed to books including Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (2002) and contributed the essay "Caribbean and South American Recordings" to Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919.

Spottswood has contributed to hundreds of reissue recordings issued by companies like Arhoolie, Rounder, Herwin, Yazoo, Document, Biograph, Revenant and Dust-to-Digital, and his own Melodeon and Piedmont labels. John Fahey, in his book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, credited a record canvassing trip with Spottswood, and the Bill Monroe record "Blue Yodel Number Seven" which Spottswood played him subsequently, with altering the course of his life.

Spottswood hosts a two-hour program called "The Dick Spottswood Show" on Bluegrass Country radio WAMU 88.5 HD-2 in Washington, D.C., and streaming online. He is an expert on bluegrass music (having co-founded Bluegrass Unlimited magazine in 1966) and on the history of recorded ethnic music of the early 20th century generally. Spottswood is a founding member of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and was awarded their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. On October 1, 2009, the International Bluegrass Music Association presented Spottswood with their Distinguished Service Award in Nashville, Tennessee. He appears briefly in the PBS documentary American Epic (2017).

On May 14, 2019, Spottswood appeared in a symposium at the Library of Congress celebrating his career.

A resident of Naples, Florida, Spottswood has emceed bluegrass concerts for the Acoustic Music Society of Southwest Florida at the Alliance for the Arts in Fort Myers, as well as the Bluegrass Jamboree in Cape Coral.