Greg Reish

Singer, instrumentalist, historian, and teacher, Greg Reish has been making music the focus of his life for over thirty years. Playing folk music, jazz, rock, and bluegrass through most of his childhood in Atlanta, he went on to study jazz guitar at the University of Miami, work as a freelance musician in Nashville, then earn master’s and doctoral degrees in historical musicology from the University of Georgia. He received a Fulbright grant to study the music of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi in Rome, and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia, the University of Hawaii-Hilo, and Buffalo State College, before assuming his current position at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Greg's performance and study of traditional American music concentrate on the rural, mostly Southern music of the 1920s through the 1940s, encompassing such styles as old time, hillbilly (early country), country blues, ragtime, and bluegrass. A guitarist first and foremost, he is adept on a variety of other instruments. Having performed throughout the U.S. and overseas, some of his more noteworthy gigs include opening for Roger McGuinn (of the Byrds) and playing for Japanese dignitaries at the American Embassy in Tokyo. As a scholar, he participated in The Bluegrass Music Symposium at Western Kentucky University, has collaborated with Mike Seeger, and conducted research in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress. Currently he is writing a book on the history of Old Time Guitar Styles.