Sarah Jane Nelson

Sarah Jane Nelson is an author and musician who documents traditional folk music communities in North America, including those of émigré musicians from Eastern Europe. Her first book, Ballad Hunting with Max Hunter: Stories of an Ozark Folksong Collector, came out with the University of Illinois Press’s Music in America Series in 2023. She is currently at work on a biography of émigré musician Sasha Polinoff whose balalaika music formed her earliest soundscape. In 2023 she was a music panelist for the ASEEES Convention in Philadelphia and presented her research on the divergent musical careers of Polinoff, Alexander Dobrohotov and “Grisha” Titov, all of whom came through Harbin. In July of 2024, she accepted an invitation to present her Polinoff research during the annual convention of the Balalaika and Domra Association of America. The convention brought together amateur musicians as well as top performing artists from Russia, Canada, and Ukraine and culminated in a public performance of Slavic music under the baton of conductor Alexander Veprinskiy. Nelson is interested in the intersection of mythmaking and representation of the émigré experience both in personal narratives and the early 20th Century Russian-American press. She is also investigating the intersection of the American Folk Revival with public interest in ethnic musical performance.