Tracy Schwarz

Daniel Tracy Schwarz was born in New York City on 13 November 1938 and grew up in New Jersey and Vermont. The country music he picked up from the radio led him to the guitar before his teens, and he learned the fiddle in the 1950s. He attended Georgetown University, and in his college years in Washington he was part of the city’s bluegrass scene, playing with Mike Seeger and the banjo player Lamar Grier. From 1960 to 1962 he served in the Army in Germany.

When Paley left the New Lost City Ramblers in the summer of 1962, Schwarz joined Seeger and Cohen. His fiddling let Seeger move to banjo and mandolin, and he widened the band’s repertoire to more bluegrass and 1940s country songs, older ballads that he sang unaccompanied in a mountain style, and Cajun music. With him the Ramblers made seven more Folkways albums, among them Gone to the Country (1963), String Band Instrumentals (1964), Rural Delivery No. 1 (1965), Remembrance of Things to Come (1966), Modern Times (1968) and an album with Cousin Emmy (1968), and they played hundreds of shows before cutting back their touring in the mid-1970s. The band’s later reunions brought two Grammy nominations in the traditional folk category, for 20th Anniversary Concert in 1987 and There Ain’t No Way Out in 1998.

In the late 1960s he and Seeger formed the Strange Creek Singers with Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard and Grier; on their one album (Arhoolie, 1972) he played fiddle, guitar and Dobro, and it included his song “Poor Old Dirt Farmer.” He also played on both of Dickens and Gerrard’s Rounder albums: on Hazel & Alice, recorded in Bethesda, Maryland, on 14 October 1972, he played fiddle on “The Sweetest Gift, a Mother’s Smile” and “Tomorrow I’ll Be Gone” and Dobro on “My Better Years,” and on Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (1976) he played fiddle on “Montana Cowboy,” “Banjo Picking Girl” and Bill Monroe’s “True Life Blues.” In 1975 he led the Old Home String Band, with the guitarist Eloise Schwarz, Bob Dalsemer, Dick Staber and Dewey Renfro, on a four-song Rounder single that included his own “I’m Gonna Put You Down (and Leave You There)” and his singing of “Shut Up in the Mines of Coal Creek.”

His own records began with Learn to Fiddle Country Style (Folkways, 1965). He recorded with Eloise Schwarz on Home Among the Hills (1973), Down Home (Folkways, 1978) and Our Kind of Music (1978), made Look Out! Here It Comes (Folkways, 1975), and led Tracy’s Family Band on Dancing Bow and Singing Strings (1979). Cajun music became a second specialty. He made four albums with Dewey Balfa, from the instruction record Traditional Cajun Fiddle (1976) to Les Quatre Vieux Garçons (Folkways, 1984), on which Tony Balfa and Schwarz’s son Peter joined them, and in the 1990s he recorded Louisiana and You (Marimac, 1991) and two Swallow albums by the Tracy Schwarz Cajun Trio (1993 and 1996).

From the 1990s he sang and recorded with Ginny Hawker, his wife and singing partner, and they lived in West Virginia. Their albums include Deep Hollows and High Ridges (Marimac, 1995), Good Songs for Hard Times (Copper Creek, 2000), which they produced themselves with Peter Schwarz and Buddy Griffin, and Draw Closer (Rounder, 2004), recorded in St. Martinville, Louisiana, and produced by Dirk Powell. Levon Helm recorded “Poor Old Dirt Farmer” on Dirt Farmer (2007), which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, and the Americana Music Association nominated the song for Song of the Year. Schwarz taught for decades, above all at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, and he was still leading jams there in his last years. He died in Elkins on 29 March 2025.