Billy Faier

Billy Faier (December 21, 1930 – January 29, 2016) was an American banjo player, folk music advocate, and Broadway performer born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1945, his family relocated to Woodstock, New York, and he later made his home in Marathon, Texas. Beginning in the late 1940s, Faier became a fixture of the folk scene centered around Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where he emerged as one of the foremost early champions of the five-string banjo during the mid-20th-century American folk revival, a distinction he shared with Pete Seeger.

Faier's recording career began in the late 1950s with two albums for Riverside Records: The Art of the Five-String Banjo in 1957 and Travelin' Man in 1958. That same year he contributed to Elektra Records' instructional combination LP How to Play Folk Guitar alongside Lee Hays and Milt Okun. He also provided transcription and notation work for Pete Seeger on multiple projects, most notably The Goofing Off Suite in 1959. During this period Faier wrote for Caravan Folk Music Magazine, eventually purchasing the publication from its founding editor Lee Hoffman and serving as editor and publisher through its final issue in July 1960.

Faier served as an on-stage banjo player for the original Broadway production of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which ran for sixteen months and concluded in February 1962. His Broadway appearance is listed in verified records as occurring in 1960, the year the production opened.

Beyond the stage, Faier worked as a disc jockey at several radio stations, including KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York, where he hosted a live folk music program called The Midnight Special. Bob Dylan appeared as a guest on that program in October 1962, following the release of his debut album. Faier is also the central subject of Ramblin' Jack Elliott's 1968 song 912 Greens, whose lyrics recount a 1953 gathering of musicians at Faier's residence at 912 Toulouse Street in New Orleans.

In 1973, Faier recorded Banjo for John Fahey's Takoma label. His discography spans several decades and includes collaborations with Dick Weissman, Eric Weissberg, Oscar Brand, John Sebastian, and Ed McCurdy, among others. In 2009, he made a substantial portion of his out-of-print and previously unreleased recordings available through his personal website. His papers and select recordings were donated in 2003 to the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina Libraries, where they are accessible to researchers. Faier died in Alpine, Texas, in 2016 at the age of 85.