Skip to main content
SIGN IN

Dyer-Bennet Records

Dyer-Bennet Records
1955—1974
English ballads and European and American folk songs, blending Indigenous, rural, and traditional materials with a unique musicality and urban artistry
Richard Dyer-Bennet, a major figure in the folk music revival of the 1940s–1970s, founded his own record company, in partnership with Harvey Cort, in 1955 to ensure that his recordings would truly reproduce his voice and guitar as they sounded in live performance and that the songs on each record would be grouped as on his concert programs.
...

The Story of Dyer-Bennet Records

After recording for mainstream labels, British American folk musician Richard Dyer-Bennet was dissatisfied with the standards of his recorded work. When the heart of his performance became distorted—the label making extreme time demands, sometimes an album a day, and restricting his control over the editing and curation of the content—the “twentieth-century minstrel” began to look for new options. With little technical knowledge of the industry, Dyer-Bennet connected with director and producer Harvey Cort at the legendary Village Vanguard, where the folk musician’s career had first taken off, and where he continued to be part of the artistic community throughout his career. Together, in 1955, they founded Dyer-Bennet Records, one of the first ever artist-owned labels (Seeger 1997). Cort remained an integral part of the label operations, producing all 15 of Richard Dyer-Bennet's recordings on the label, while continuing his career in TV documentary directing and production and later playwriting and directing.

That same year, the label put out its first album, Richard Dyer-Bennet 1, engineered by Rudy van Gelder, who had already recorded many iconic jazz albums. The impressive melodic range of Dyer-Bennet's performances, his lyric tenor range previously impossible to capture in commercial recordings, proved an obstacle even to van Gelder, who had to manually widen the groove of the master disc to avoid sound distortion. As a result of this attention to detail, Dyer-Bennet produced recordings of such high fidelity, reviews noted his breath could be heard (Jenkins 2010:85). Dyer-Bennet and Cort had small dreams for that first record; the latter was satisfied with distributing copies as personal gifts and the former was looking to promote his concerts, using the record to give listeners a sense of his poetic performances which, through voice alone, evoked an image of a minstrel clad in a tuxedo. Unexpectedly, the album was a critical and commercial success, setting off Richard Dyer-Bennet's release of thirteen more albums over the next decade.

Gallery
Click to view slideshow
  • Black and white image of Richard Dyer-Bennet wearing a suit. He is sitting on a stool strumming a guitar and his mouth is open mid song.
  • Black and white image of a younger Richard Dyer-Bennet in a tuxedo with a white tie. He is singing and strumming a guitar, and a lute is hung on the wall behind him.
  • Black and white image of Richard Dyer-Bennet's side profile. He plays a guitar and is partially obscured by a blur in the image’s center.
  • Yellow toned, black and white image of Richard Dyer-Bennet from the shoulders up wearing a suit. His guitar is visible in the bottom corner.
  • Black and white image of Lead Belly, facing towards the camera and Richard Dyer-Bennet in profile. They are both standing, singing and playing guitar.
  • Black and white image of Richard Dyer-Bennet sitting in a suit with a guitar between his legs and writing on a music stand.
  • 1 / 7
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Betty Rosenzweig. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 2 / 7
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 3 / 7
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Joe Covello from Black Star. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 4 / 7
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 5 / 7
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by David Robbins from Picture Features, Inc. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 6 / 7
    Leadbelly and Richard Dyer-Bennet at Village Vanguard.
    Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution. 1940s.
  • 7 / 7
    Dyer-Bennet at Moffat House.
    Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution. 1951.

Although he was featured on every one of his label’s releases, Richard Dyer-Bennet was known to be chiefly collaborative, in both production and performance. Collaboration and mentorship brought the only other lead vocalist into the fold at Dyer-Bennet Records. After receiving a recording of Aksel Schiøtz for Christmas in 1947, Dyer-Bennet instantly heard a kindred spirit in the mezzo tenor. In 1960, he invited Schiøtz to record Aksel Schiøtz singing Schubert, Bellman, Wolf, Brahms for Dyer-Bennet Records in 1960. Dyer-Bennet accompanied Schiøtz on Spanish guitar on the record and the pair reunited in 1963 at a performance in Boulder, Colorado. They remained friends until Aksel Schiøtz’s death in 1975. Dyer-Bennet also listened to the suggestions of his friends and supporters. In 1961, co-founder Harvey Cort wrote Dyer-Bennet, recommending he include twenty-six songs currently unrecorded in his repertoire on his next record. Six of these were selected the next year, for Richard Dyer-Bennet 10, “he was certainly listening to what I had to say,” Cort recalled in 2008. “I was just telling him what I wanted to hear” (Jenkins 2010:79).

After Richard Dyer-Bennet 13: Stories and Songs for Children and Their Parents was released in 1964, Dyer-Bennet's self-titled series was complete. To many, this marked the end of his recording career, however, a talented translator (often publishing his translations from German, French, Portuguese, and Austrian in his albums’ liner notes), Dyer-Bennet dedicated this final portion of his life to two projects: Die Schöne Müllerin (The Lovely Milleress) and The Odyssey. The music for the former, Wilhelm Müller’s lyric poem turned Franz Schubert’s song cycle, was published in 1967, before being recorded and released by Dyer-Bennet Records in 1976. After receiving a generous grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities in 1978 to record Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, Dyer-Bennet performed segments across the country (the first of which was at the Village Vanguard) and made some video recordings —“The Odyssey Tapes”— for posterity’s sake. However, Richard Dyer-Bennet died in 1991 before completing and officially recording and releasing the work.

In 1995, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings acquired Dyer-Bennet Records, preserving them in our collection and making Dyer-Bennet Nos. 1–13 available to the public in perpetuity. Soon after, recognizing the value of Dyer-Bennet’s recordings, Smithsonian Folkways re-released some of his albums on CD in the late 1990s, introducing Dyer-Bennet Records to a new generation of listeners.

—Matilda Marcus, Dumbarton Oaks Fellow (2024-2025). April 2025.

Bibliography

Dyer-Bennet, Bonnie. 1997. “A Biographical Essay on Richard Dyer-Bennet.” Liner notes for Richard Dyer-Bennet 1, 3–14. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW40078. https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/SFW40078.pdf.

Jenkins, Paul O. 2010. Richard Dyer-Bennet: The Last Minstrel. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Seeger, Anthony. 1997. “Dyer-Bennet Records in 1955 and 1997.” Liner notes for Richard Dyer-Bennet 1, 1–3. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW40078. https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/SFW40078.pdf.

Gallery
Click to view slideshow
  • Black and white image of Dyer-Bennet sitting on the doorstep of a wooden barn. He holds a pipe in one hand while the other holds sheet music.
  • Black and white image of Dyer-Bennet wearing a tuxedo. He is singing and plays a guitar.
  • Black and white image of Richard-Dyer-Bennet wearing a tuxedo. He sits at a diagonal and is singing and strumming a guitar, looking forwards and down.
  • Front cover of a pamphlet about Aksel Schiøtz featuring a cyanotype blue photo of the singer, wearing thick-rimmed glasses.
  • In a black and white image, Richard Dyer-Bennet's head is blurry in motion as he sits holding a cigarette in a dark suit.
  • Black and white image of Richard Dyer-Bennet sitting in a suit and tie looking cheerful singing and playing guitar.
  • Richard Dyer-Bennet, largely silhouetted, stands looking at the guitar he is strumming. The image is backlit by six white bright windows. A guitar case and sheet music are on the floor.
  • Richard Dyer-Bennet stands on stage holding a guitar in a tuxedo, his foot resting on a stool. He is spotlit and his silhouette is projected on the back wall.
  • 1 / 8
    Dyer-Bennet at Stockbridge.
    1950 or 1951. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 2 / 8
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Portrait of Richard Dyer-Bennet, Village Vanguard, William P. Gottlieb, New York, N.Y., ca. Mar. 1947.
  • 3 / 8
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Archie Lieberman. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 4 / 8
    Aksel Schiøtz pamphlet cover.
    Pamphlet cover by Concert Artists Management and Albert Kay Associates. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 5 / 8
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 6 / 8
    Richard-Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by David Robbins from Picture Features, Inc. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 7 / 8
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by Betty Rosenzweig. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
  • 8 / 8
    Richard Dyer-Bennet.
    Photo by David Robbins from Picture Features, Inc. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
Click the image above to view gallery