Ashland University Archives
Hazen Folk Music Collection
Marji Hazen

5 record storage box
1 file drawer cabinet

May 1998 Preface

The Hazen Folk Music Collection is divided into two separate areas under the following scheme.

1)Audio tapes which contains both open reel and cassettes.

2)Paper based items are filled in one record storage box.

See also appendix A for listing of books which relates to this collection.
See also appendix B for listing of Cooperative Recreation Service-collected titles.
See also appendix C for listing of audio tapes.
See also appendix D for listing of phonographic records.
Introduction

The following summaries concerns the various groupings of the audio tapes.

3rd Sunday Gathering:(1987-1988) informal music performances held in Galena, Ohio on the
third Sunday afternoon from 2-5 pm each month. The group was led by Gail Reed and Marji
Hazen.

Folkcetera: (1990) was Marji's Ballad Book after being taken over by radio program director David
Gordon on WCBE Columbus, Ohio. The program aired on Saturday evenings at 10 pm. Marji
Hazen left the show due to differences of opinion with the producer.

Friends in D: (1987-1988) served as the first band formed in Columbus, Ohio by Marji Hazen.
They played at the Ohio State Fair in Columbus and also at the Bob Evans Dulcimer Festival.

GBSDF: (1986) Great Black Swamp Dulcimer Festival was under the direction of Doctor susan Porter of Ohio State University Lima Branch.

Germantown (1986-1987) performances held at the Ohio Miami Military Academy. Contains
dulcimer and other music. Concerts were held once a year.

Ann Grimes: Primer dulcimer expert in Granville, Ohio. Tapes includes her discussion of the
musical contributions of Mary O. Eddy.

Howards & Charlies: (1987) Howards were a blind couple from Quaker City; Charlie Steinman was fiddler who had received grants from the Ohio Humanities council to teach young people (such as Alice Orchard who was 16 years old when this tape was made).

Last Fling: (1987) music similiar to the Germantown recordings, but held at the Deleware State
Park in October 1987.

Leland Trace: (1987-1989) a group of 11 people which performed at the Ohio State Fair.

Missing Peace: written for Central Christian High School in Millersburg, Ohio. This is a church
cantata complied by Marji Hazen.

Musketballs & Appleseeds:(1987) Gail and Art Reed reanactments of Rev. Billy Wonder with
harp and dulcimer accompainment.

National Folk Festival: (1984-1985) was in held in Cuyahoga County in Ohio. This festival is
held in different locations around the country every three years.

Ohio Hills Folk Festival: (1984) a week long series of events focusing on dulcimers, fiddles and
banjoheld at Quaker City, Ohio.
 

Parlour Band: (1989-1990) was the Leland Trace band after some of the band members had left
the group.

Roundelay: (1987) a PBS shared program with another preson.

Pheobe Wise: (d. 1931) lived in Mansfield, Ohio. This is an interview with Jim Van Cura done in
1957 concerning the life of Pheobe Wise.
 
 

Biography

Marji Hazen was born in Ashland, Ohio, December 12, 1936 into a family that had direct
ancestors living in Green Township before 1819. She grew up in a log house in Mifflin that had
been in the family since 1912, attended Hayesville School through 8th grade and Ashland High
School until the middle of her sophomore year. She graduated from Madison High School,
Mansfield, Ohio in 1954 and received a B.A. degree in English from Bluffton College (Ohio) in
1965. 1966-1971 she taught English at Millersburg Junior High School where she organized
some of her students into the Millersburg Minstrels Old Time Washtub Band which was invited to
appear before the Ohio Folklore Society in Columbus in 1968. In 1971, she became officially
employed by WMAN radio in Mansfield as a copywriter and continued to provide that service
full-time until 1977 and then on contract through 1985. She received an M.S. degree in
Rehabilitation Administration from DePaul University, Chicago in 1983 while she was serving as a
Habilitation Specialist II at Richland County workshop for adults with mental retardation. In
1986 she was accepted into a Ph.D. program in Instructional Design with an emphsis on
computer-aided instruction in the School of Education at Ohio State University. In 1988 she
completed the required course work and was employed as a CAI computer programmer at the
Ohio State Univeristy Medical School where she used the IBM pilot authoring language and
Macintosh Hypercard to build computer programs to instruct medical students in basic concepts.
In 1991, she retired because of illness without taking the comprehensive examination or
completing her degree. Marji is legally blind, but always said her limitation was not so much the
vision impairment as being unable to drive a car.

Entertaining with her collection of songs and folk instruments (guitar, mountian dulcimer,
Celestaphone, folk harp, etc.), encouraging others to make homemade music, and hosting
"Marji's Ballad Book" were Marji's lifelong hobbies. She hosted the program weekly on radio
from 1961 to 1990. During that time she made studio and field recordings of hundreds of
amateur and professional musicians, most from Ohio, all performing in Ohio venues, collected
commercial and field recordings of them and those who influenced and inspired them, and
developed an extensive library of folk, traditional, and some popular music books and
manuscripts. She was most interested in native Ohio folk musicians who were little-known or
familiar only to their families and perhaps to the local community. As she, herself, wrote more
than 150 original songs, most about Ohio events and people, she encouraged others to preserve
music learned from family and community and to create their own music in the "folk" tradition.
Forwards in a number of dulcimer and traditional music collections including Elizabeth Salt's
book of Ohio historical songs acknowledge Hazen's contributions to their content. She has
published seven tapes of her own music as well as several large print music books for mountain
dulcimer and a number of articles on playing music in parlour (as opposed to stage) style. In
1986, she founded The Public Domain Information Project which significantly increased ordinary
people's access to and use of the public domain upto to fifteen years before such access became
commonplace on the Internet. The orgam