Roger Deitz Biography

Roger Deitz has been on the road with Willie Nelson - sharing a bottle of Jack Daniels on the tour bus while an IRS agent went over the evening's concert receipts. Deitz hung out back stage with his acting coach Michael Moriarty, discussing the theater with Kevin Kline and Amy Irving. He has compared musical licks with Don McLean and John Hartford, participating in a mind-blowing 'till dawn jam at the Long Island Folk Festival with David Bromberg, Roger McGuinn, and Phil and John Cunningham of Silly Wizard. (Thank you Paula Ballan!). He sipped champagne at the Russian Tearoom with Bill Murray and Emmylou Harris, dated Peggy Noonan at Fairleigh Dickinson University and shared a corned beef sandwich with historian Will Durant at Canter's Deli in Los Angeles. Deitz also served Bill Monroe a dry martini at the ASCAP awards dinner in Nashville when the father of bluegrass mistook Roger for a waiter, albeit one clad in a seedy tuxedo. In addition to all this, thanks in part to the efforts of his dear departed agent and manager Len Rosenfeld, Roger Deitz has appeared on stage with just about every folk related name one can name - Richie Havens, Tom Paxton, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega, Gamble Rogers and the list goes on and on. Yes Virginia - there is a folk Zelig, and he artfully plays the guitar and banjo. He is as much at home in front of an audience as he is sitting at his word processor.

As one of the more widely read acoustic music journalists around, Roger Deitz has written about music for over thirty years, penning articles for notable magazines such as Sing Out!, Frets, Fast Folk, Acoustic Guitar, and Billboard . He started with a few reviews at The Herald News and a folk music column in 1973 in the Aquarian. Today, Deitz is a popular columnist and contributor to Sing Out! magazine, the publication founded by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson back in 1950. Roger is a member of Sing Out! 's advisory board as well, along with such folk notables as Pete Seeger, Richie Havens, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Graham Nash and Randy Poe. Upon Pete Seeger's recent retirement from his own Sing Out! column "Appleseeds," the Kennedy Center Honor receipient wrote an open letter to Deitz at Sing Out! remarking, "Thanks for your column. Every issue I turn to it first. Please keep on thru the decades."

Roger Deitz authored The Folk Music Chronicles, a collection of his Fast Folk columns in book form. Deitz is himself a founding member of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance who is the primary author of an extensive entry on "New Jersey and Popular Music" in the recently published Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. For many years Roger Deitz has performed his music on guitar and banjo for crowds as large as ten thousand at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and other notable venues. Deitz played a role in the seminal days of up-and-comers in Greenwich Village as a member of the Fast Folk collective of artists in the eighties, as a performer and chronicler of that vibrant folk scene surrounding the Speakeasy for the Fast Folk Musical Magazine which carried his writings and songs.

Deitz helped advance New Jersey's folk scene in the 1980s as program director of The June Days Folk Festival and the Closing Circle Coffeehouse for the Folk Music Society of Northern New Jersey. Not only was he a mentor to folk performers through his teach-ins and articles, many of these artists played first in New Jersey through his aegis. Cheryl Wheeler, Patty Larkin, Christine Lavin, John Gorka, Nanci Griffith, and an army of others were introduced to area audiences via his intuitive and savvy bookings. More recently he served as special concert chairman for The Folk Project. As a regular guest on Happy and Artie Traum's public radio show, "Bring it on Home" out of Albany, WAMC, Deitz treated listeners to his unique stories and songs; some humorous, others very touching. His playing has been termed, "classy, not flashy" and some of his songs (such as "The Sheep Dip," and "FiFi the Microwave Pup") have helped create a cult following. Deitz' debut album made the East Coast Rocker' s top ten best list for 1988.

A native of Clifton, New Jersey, Deitz earned his High School letter in golf as a member of the school's winning golf team. He went on to attend medical school (briefly), and graduate schools in New Jersey, teaching courses such as Biology and Microscopic Anatomy at Rutgers University, St. Peter's College and Bloomfield College. Twenty-five years ago he founded Rescan Associates Inc, a consulting firm that worked at research and development companies and has plied his trade at Hoffmann-La Roche, Allied-Signal, and ATT Laboratories, to name a few. He has contributed articles on diversity for The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education for more than fifteen years, penning over 500,000 words for the magazine where he serves as Special Projects Editor.

Roger Deitz
Short Bio

"The compositions of Roger Deitz, a musician and writer with acerbic wit, have a traditional flavor that fit with other songs of the folk legacy. Playing primarily guitar and banjo, Roger has performed and hosted at various venues, including repeat performances at the prestigious Philadelphia Folk Festival, Long Island Folk Festival and the World Hunger Year Hungerthon concerts. He is a regular contributor to such music publications as Billboard, Sing Out! and Acoustic Guitar and his book, The Folk Music Chronicles, continues to be popular." - The New Jersey Folk Festival

 

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