Alan Jabbour

Alan Jabbour (June 21, 1942 – January 13, 2017) was an American musician and folklorist, and the founding director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Jabbour was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Syria, and his father later joined him. He was educated in the Jacksonville public schools and at the Bolles School, where he graduated from high school in 1959. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Miami in 1963 and received his M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1968) from Duke University.

A violinist from the age of seven, Alan Jabbour was a member of the Jacksonville Symphony, the Brevard Music Festival Orchestra, the Miami Symphony, and the University of Miami String Quartet. While a graduate student, he became interested in American fiddle styles and traveled in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia to record instrumental folk music, folksong, and folklore on tape. This collection, particularly rich in traditional fiddle tunes from the Upper South, is now in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress.

The documentation trips merged into a process of apprenticeship, and he began playing the fiddle under the influence of new masters, particularly Henry Reed, who was then in his eighties. Out of this interaction arose a band of young musicians, the Hollow Rock String Band, which became the core of the old-time music scene that blossomed in Durham and Chapel Hill in the later 1960s. In 1968, the year that Henry Reed died, the band released a long-playing record, The Hollow Rock String Band: Traditional Dance Tunes.

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