Richard Dyer-Bennet

Richard Dyer-Bennet was born on 6 October 1913 in Leicester, England, the eldest son of Miriam Wolcott Clapp and Richard Stewart Dyer-Bennet, a Major in the Leicester Regiment who sustained wounds on two separate occasions during World War I. His paternal grandfather was Frederick Stewart Hotham Dyer-Bennet, a grandson of Sir Thomas Swinnerton Dyer, 9th Baronet. Dyer-Bennet spent his formative years across Germany, Canada, and California before establishing himself as an English-born American folk singer — a term he himself preferred to replace with "minstrel" — as well as a recording artist and voice teacher. He died on 14 December 1991 at his home in Monterey, Massachusetts, from cancer.

Dyer-Bennet trained his voice under Gertrude Wheeler Beckman and Sven Scholander. His encounter with Scholander proved particularly formative; he later described the older performer as someone who sang as though drawing directly from his own life, accompanying himself on lute while evoking soldiers, sailors, lovers, and landscapes. During his peak years as a performer, Dyer-Bennet gave approximately 50 concerts annually. A 1972 stroke paralyzed his left side and brought his concert career to a halt, though he subsequently taught himself to play harp one-handed in order to continue performing and teaching.

His Broadway career included an appearance in 1946 in Second Best Bed. Beyond the stage, Dyer-Bennet recorded extensively across multiple labels before founding his own imprint, Dyer-Bennet Records, on which he recorded in his personal living room. His debut album, released in 1949 on Decca as Richard Dyer-Bennet: Twentieth Century Minstrel, included the song "The Lonesome Valley," which WFMT used for many years as the closing piece of its Saturday night Midnight Special broadcast and was a subject of interview by Studs Terkel. His subsequent discography on Dyer-Bennet Records spanned more than a dozen volumes between 1955 and 1964, covering material ranging from Stephen Foster songs and Beethoven settings of Scottish and Irish songs to stories and songs for children. A 1967 Folkways Records release compiled his recordings from 1939 to 1945. All of the Dyer-Bennet Records releases have since been reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways.

In 1936, Dyer-Bennet married Elizabeth Hoar Pepper; the couple divorced in 1941. He married Melvene Ipcar in 1942, and they had two daughters, Brooke and Bonnie. His daughter Bonnie contributed a biographical essay to the CD reissue of Richard Dyer-Bennet 1, addressing both his progressive politics and his experience following his stroke. In 1970, Simon and Schuster published The Richard Dyer-Bennet Folk Song Book. A full biography, Richard Dyer-Bennet: The Last Minstrel by Paul O Jenkins, was published in December 2009 by the University Press of Mississippi, with a foreword by his daughter. From 1983 until his death, Dyer-Bennet held the position of heir presumptive of the Dyer baronets.