Jeff Place

Jeff Place (born 1956) is an American writer and producer, and a curator and senior archivist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He has won three Grammy Awards and six Indie Awards.

Early life

Place learned his appreciation for folk music from his parents who took him to Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary concerts when he was a child. He attended Kenyon College, graduating in 1979. After college, Place worked in a record store in Washington, D.C. and started writing reviews for the store's magazine, REVUE.

He then enrolled in the University of Maryland, receiving a Master of Library Science with a specialization in sound archives.

Career

After graduate school, Place started working at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1988, Place and Anthony "Tony" Seeger were the first two full-time employees at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage when the Smithsonian acquired Folkways Records from the estate of Moses Asch. In 1989, he started writing liner notes for the Folkways albums. He has also written companion books for special releases and box sets.

Place has been involved in the compilation of more than sixty albums of American music for Smithsonian Folkways. He won three Grammy Awards, two (Best Album Notes and Best Historical Album) in 1997 for Anthology of American Folk Music - 1997 Expanded Edition, and one (Producer) for Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Collection in 2019. He received Grammy-nominations for five other productions (ten nominations total). He also received six Indie Awards.

Place has helped curate several exhibitions, including This Land is Your Land, which is about Woody Guthrie.

Awards and honors

Personal life

After living in Mayo, Maryland since 1997, Place moved to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina in 2020.

Discography