When Mark Bilyeu and Cindy Woolf walked into the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium, it wasn’t the first time the musical duo performed on the national stage.

Known as the Creek Rocks, the folk-music duo came to Washington, D.C., for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as part of the program focused on the Ozarks. For two weeks, they sang songs of the Midwest region with listeners on the National Mall. Nor were they the first to sing most of the songs they shared, tunes passed down through generations and some from places far from the Ozarks.

This time, they were the first: the first Artists in Resonance, a fellowship launched by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. This honor is what led them to the stage on August 21, 2025.

“They are fantastic singers, songwriters, arrangers, and performers and have released albums of traditional and original material, including songs sourced from other archives,” said Jennifer Cutting, folklife specialist with the Library of Congress, as she opened the concert. “We’re delighted to be the very first audience to hear the fruits of their research at the American Folklife Center. ”

Over the course of an hour, Bilyeu and Woolf shared songs like “Barbara Allen,” and “Red River Shore,” legacy ballads telling the tale of troubled love. Applause echoed through the auditorium, bringing a standing ovation.

“It’s very exciting,” Woolf said. “It’s an honor to be asked to perform here. Walking through the building, seeing our picture everywhere, is just kind of unreal. I would say it’s life-affirming.”

Setting the Stage for the Fellowship

In a way, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival played a role in connecting Bilyeu and Woolf with the fellowship they eventually received.

They took time while in D.C. for the Festival to visit the American Folklife Center, a reading room at the Library of Congress that, as its website notes, “documents and shares the many expressions of human experience to inspire, revitalize, and perpetuate living cultural traditions.”

There, in addition to exploring papers from individuals like noted folklorist Vance Randolph, the duo viewed materials that solidified a personal connection with the collections. 

“Right off the bat, it started out with a song that my grandma used to sing,” Bilyeu recalled of a presentation they viewed. “The enormity of the moment of where we were, and all the cool stuff we were around, and then hearing that voice come through—essentially singing this same song as my grandmother… I got a little misty. Just a little misty about the whole thing.”

That initial visit led to their application for the fellowship, which is planned as an annual honor to “to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the American Folklife Center Archives.”

It was funded by a bequest from the late Mike Rivers, a folk musician and engineer who was a member of Pete Seeger’s very first Clearwater Sloop crew.

“What Mike Rivers wanted was to facilitate artists getting into the collections and coming out with something new, in the sense that it's a reinterpretation; the reimagination of the material,” said John Fenn, head of research and programs at AFC. “[Bilyeu and Woolf’s] project was competitive in my mind from the beginning out of the twenty or so we received that year. It was the spirit, the practicality, and the passion for the content.” 

Months of anxiously awaiting the news paid off in the end.

“It was the best news we’d ever gotten,” Woolf said.

Focus of the Fellowship and Its Reverberating Impact

The couple traveled to D.C. in 2024 to conduct research in the AFC archives, which focused on the work of Sidney Robertson Cowell.

In the 1930s, Cowell collected folk music for the Resettlement Administration in D.C., recording local musicians on a new-to-the-time portable sound recording device. The effort introduced her to Ozarks musicians in Arkansas, and those tunes captured Bilyeu and Woolf’s ears. 

“It’s really cool to be part of the journey of these folk songs,” Woolf said, speaking to the evolution of songs through the people who share them. “[Cowell] said herself that folk music is a living, breathing, constantly evolving thing that is passed from one person to the next and not necessarily written down. In fact, she said, ‘When a song is written down, it’s trapped like a fly in amber.’

“I don’t mind messing around with them and changing them to suit us and how we would like to perform them,” Woolf continued, sharing a song called “Young Charlotte” that was recorded by several Ozarkers in the collection. “I just kind of took them all and pieced together the parts that I liked from each performance, and came up with our own.”

Both generational Ozarkers, Woolf and Bilyeu represent a spectrum of Ozarks culture. Woolf hails from Arkansas and began her musical journey with piano. It was when she moved to Springfield, Missouri, for college that an interest in folk and bluegrass began, leading her to ultimately write her own songs, too.

The Bilyeu name reverberates through the Ozarks, where the family represents generations of musical heritage. In more recent times, that’s come to the public consciousness through Big Smith, an uber-popular regional band that revived for a concert at the 2023 Festival.

The musicians met in 2002, became musical collaborators, and ultimately married. They’ve been performing as the Creek Rocks for about a decade.

“I think, if we had a mission, part of that was that the record would just make people be aware of the collections if they might not have otherwise,” Bilyeu said in 2020 of folk-music research the couple did for their first album. Titled Wolf Hunter, the album focused on recordings collected by folklorists John Quincy Wolf —no relation to Woolf—and Max Hunter. Like Cowell, Wolf and Hunter recorded folk songs throughout the region.

“I just like the idea of taking [this material] and having it live in the present,” Bilyeu said.

This work fuels what comes next: new interest, new imaginings, and new cultural moments. That will ultimately shine through the Creek Rocks’ new album, to be released in the coming months, that will highlight songs they found through the fellowship.

“Part of our proposal for the fellowship was that the end result was not just making the album, but to bring the music back to Springfield and other communities,” Bilyeu said. “So I just want to emphasize that and say, ‘Get ready, Springfield.’

“If we can help increase people’s appreciation of their own heritage and make people more aware of what was going on with the music from back then, mission accomplished.”

Kaitlyn McConnell is the founder of Ozarks Alive, an online project dedicated to the documentation of local history and culture. She was part of the curatorial team for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region.