Billy Faier

Billy Faier (December 21, 1930 – January 29, 2016) was an American banjo player. He, along with Pete Seeger, was one of the early exponents of the banjo during the mid-20th-century American folk music revival.

Born in Brooklyn, New York,^[1] he moved with his family to Woodstock, New York in 1945,^[2] and later lived in Marathon, Texas. Active in the Washington Square Park folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1940s, he recorded two albums for Riverside Records, The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957) and Travelin' Man (1958).^[3] In 1973, he recorded Banjo for John Fahey's Takoma label.

He died in Alpine, Texas, in 2016, aged 85.^[4]

Selected discography

In 2009, Faier decided to make much of his out of print and unreleased material available on his website.

• The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957 – with Frank Hamilton)
• Travelin' Man (1958)
• The Beast of Billy Faier (1964 – with John Sebastian)
• Banjo (1973)
• Banjos, Birdsong and Mother Earth (1987 – with John Sebastian and Gilles Malkine)

References

External links

• Billy Faier's website
• Billy Faier discography (with some errors and omissions).
• Billy Faier at the Internet Broadway Database.
• Billy Faier Collection at The Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina libraries.
• Articles by Billy Faier in No Depression.
• Feature on Billy Faier on The Banjo Man