Cindy Woolf

Cindy Woolf is a singer, songwriter, and banjo player from Batesville, Arkansas, along the southern foothills of the Ozarks. Across two decades of recordings and performance, she has built a body of work rooted in the place she comes from, with a voice and writing style that have drawn praise across the region and beyond.

Her solo career began in the early 2000s and produced three albums of original songs, including Simple and Few in 2006 and May in 2013. Her writing draws on Ozark tradition, family memory, and her own atmospheric sensibility, with songs like “Dearest Pearl” weaving together lines borrowed from her grandmother’s diary and new lyrics shaped around them.

In 2015, Woolf and her husband, guitarist Mark Bilyeu, established The Creek Rocks, an Ozark folk duo dedicated to reviving and reshaping the traditional music of the region for contemporary audiences. Their debut album, Wolf Hunter, gathers sixteen songs drawn from the collections of folklorists John Quincy Wolf of Batesville and Max Hunter of Springfield, Missouri, paying tribute to the two hometowns that shaped them.

In 2024, Woolf and Bilyeu were named recipients of the Artists in Resonance Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, supporting an album-length project based on the field recordings of folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell, who documented Missouri and Arkansas Ozark communities in 1936 and 1937. Their work has taken them to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Library of Congress, and continues to introduce wider audiences to the music of the Ozarks.