Bucky Halker is a musician and historian with 15 albums to his credit, including Anywhere But Utah: Songs of Joe Hill (2015), honoring martyred Swedish labor songster Hill, and The Ghost of Woody Guthrie (2012), an original music tribute to Guthrie. Halker, a Ph.D. in labor history, is the author of For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-1895 and the producer-scholar for the Folksongs of Illinois CD series, vols. 1-5. He has received numerous, including the Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center in 2012. Bucky also served a guest professor at Carl von Ossietzky University in 2016 in Oldenburg, Germany. Since 2007 he has been the director of Company of Folk, an organization devoted to folk and ethnic arts in Illinois.