Elijah Wald has been performing for almost fifty years in a wide variety of styles, from blues, folk, ragtime, swing, country, and cowboy songs to classic Swahili pop, the Bahamian guitar style of Joseph Spence, and Mexican corridos. He hit the road in his late teens as a rambling busker, and has toured all over the United States and much of the rest of the world, playing in coffeehouses, bars, nightclubs, colleges, concert halls,  and on festival stages from New Orleans to Chicago, Tokyo, Salzburg, and Sydney.

Elijah’s mentors include Dave Van Ronk, with whom he performed, recorded, and wrote Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (which inspired the Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis); Howard Armstrong, the legendary Black string band master, with whom he toured for five years; Eric Von Schmidt, the founding father of the Cambridge folk/blues scene; and Jean-Bosco Mwenda, the father of Congolese acoustic guitar. He won a 2002 Grammy (for liner notes, which in Van Ronk’s words “is kind of like getting the Nobel Prize in fingerpainting,” but still nice), filmed a highly-regarded instructional video on the guitar style of the Bahamian wizard Joseph Spence, and his shows blend music and stories from a wide range of people and places in a compellingly personal style.

Elijah’s music and stories are deeply informed by his second career as a chronicler of American and world music. Along with the Van Ronk memoir, he has written books on Josh White and Robert Johnson, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton and the censorship of early blues, an alternative history of popular music provocatively titled How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll,  and Dylan Goes Electric!, the basis of the film A Complete Unknown.