Jeff Place (born 1956) is the Grammy Award-winning writer and producer and a curator and senior archivist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.[1][2][3][4] He has won three Grammy Awards and six Indie Awards.[5][2][4]
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.[4] He attended Kenyon College, graduating in 1979.[6] After college, Place worked in a record store in Washington, D.C. and started writing reviews for the store's magazine, REVUE.[4]
He then enrolled in the University of Maryland, receiving an Master of Library Science with a specialization in sound archives.[4][1]
After graduate school, Place started working at the Smithsonian Institution.[4] 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.[3][1] In 1989, he started writing liner notes for the Folkways albums.[4] He has also written companion books for special releases and box sets.[7]
Place has been involved in the compilation of more than sixty albums of American music for Smithsonian Folkways.[1] 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.[5][2] He received Grammy-nominations for five other productions (ten nominations total).[5][2] He also received six Indie Awards.[2]
Place helped curate several exhibitions, including This Land is Your Land about Woodie Guthrie.[1]
After living in Mayo, Maryland since 1997, Place moved to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina in 2020.[4]