Jeff Place, an award-winning writer, producer and curator with the Smithsonian museum’s nonprofit record label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, has been a resident of Mayo, Maryland for 23 years.

Place, 63, has been nominated for eight Grammy awards and 12 Indie Awards and won two Grammys and six Indies. He received a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album and Best Liner Notes for “Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection,” a six-CD collection accompanied by a 200-page book Place wrote detailing the history of Seeger, an American activist and folk artist who influenced music for generations.

Place talked to The Capital about his early inspirations, his career as a Smithsonian sound archivist and his achievements in the music industry.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where did your taste for folk music come from?

My parents were folk music fans back when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary were big. They’d take me to see shows. I always liked the music. When I became a teenager, I got into rock and roll for a long time as everybody else did. When I was in college, though, I started doing college radio. No one was doing a folk show and I knew a fair amount about folk, so I fell into that.

I think I may have had a couple of thousand albums by the time I got out of high school.

How did your career of writing album notes begin?

When I got out of college I ended up running a record store in Washington, D.C. for a while. We had a magazine called REVUE. I started writing reviews on folk music and other stuff for the magazine. After I went to library school at the University of Maryland, I got a degree in sound archives and started working for the Smithsonian. At the time, the Smithsonian started up a record label carrying on the work of a label called Folkways Records from New York City that had been around for 40 years. It was music from all over the world: folk, blues, jazz, tribal music, stuff like that. We started putting out new records. It became fairly apparent to people that I knew something about folk music. My old boss had me start writing liner notes, that was in 1989. I’ve been doing it ever since. I think I’ve done something like 60-odd CDs and books.

What do those archives look like?

We probably have 50,000 to 60,000 recordings in there. Just a matter of going through and trying to get the stuff out to create these products so that people can actually experience this stuff. They can purchase these recordings and learn the story about who these artists are.

How do you organize these recordings?

In the case of Pete Seeger, the first CD I made is a Greatest Hits. The next five CDs are more chronological starting with his first recordings ever up toward the very end of his life. Trying to go through all the different phases of the things that he went through, the things that he was interested in and writing about to tell the story.

You wrote a 200-page book on Seeger’s life and music to accompany the CD collection, tell me about that.

I look at these things that I do like, if you walk into a Smithsonian museum, you walk into a room and there are objects and then there are the panels next to them with all the words on them, and photographs, things like that. The books I do tend to look like that. It’s like a little exhibit in a 12x12 book with audio in the back you can listen to.

Who is Pete Seeger?

He grew up in New York in the 1930s and 1940s around a very political left-wing activist community. He was heavily involved, he was affected by the McCarthy years and got blacklisted for a long time and kind of had to go underground. He changed a lot of the sound of music in the ’60s. He was involved in the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, any movement that needed a person with a banjo and a message. He was hardcore about that. He was somebody who should get a lot of respect. I want to make sure people nowadays who are younger get to know who this person was because he was really important.

What is your process when you go through these archives to create a historical album?

It’s my 33rd year coming up in a week or two. For years, I was digitizing and transferring recordings and cataloging them and organizing them while being really, really detailed on what these recordings were that we had in the archives. As I was digitizing, I ended up listening to a good percentage of what’s back there and learned a lot. The idea a lot of the times is, I’m done with this major project working with recordings of a certain artist or a certain kind of music. Then, I create one of these collections because I’m able to kind of like, get it out of my head, all these things I’ve learned.

We’re still out there collecting old, extinct record companies with some recordings made in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. If they want to donate the stuff to the Smithsonian, we’ll make it available for people to listen to. When we get a brand new record company to catalog, I’ll immerse myself in learning everything about the history of that company and everyone their recordings. And then we’ll create something out of it, like some sort of box set to tell the story.

What’s it like to attend the Grammys?

I’m more likely to have something in common with the people producing reggae records than with Cardi B or someone. The thing that’s really cool about the Grammys is, if you’re nominated, there’s a nominees party at this really beautiful hotel/museum place the night before that you can only attend if you’re nominated. You can’t buy your way into it. That’s where you go and you run into people like Tony Bennett or Jack Black, we were talking to him at the last one. Those are fun.