Summer Centered: Theo Schefer '24 Finds a Gateway to History in Folk Music

Theo Schefer ’24 knew of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan before this summer, but he didn’t know them. Spending the summer digging through their music and its history during his internship with the American Song Archives, he’s discovered a love of folk music alongside his deepening passion for the power of museums.

While working remotely from his New York City home for the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based archives, Schefer is creating displays and public programming to help open up the cultural and musical history of the folk genre to a wider audience. He’s designing three pop-up exhibitions for a community lending resource program at History Colorado that will bring material from the archives of Guthrie and Phil Ochs—another pivotal figure in the folk movement—to smaller institutions without the means or infrastructure to handle substantial programming. 

“One idea I have been pursuing is a three-panel display that compares and contrasts Guthrie’s anti-fascist songwriting with Ochs’ anti-war theatricality in order to explore the American public’s complex relationship with war between the 1940s and 1960s,” Schefer said.

After interning at the American Museum of Natural History in high school, where conversations with visitors about everything from dinosaurs to insulators inspired his interest in museum work, Schefer saw working with the American Song Archives as a chance to expand his experience with the art of display while also learning more about how institutions like these build public outreach. It has also given him the opportunity to put into practice many of the research skills he’s developed over the past three years as a history major at Haverford, all while “delving deeper into the sounds that have echoed across generations.” The internship is supported by the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, which are also supporting Schefer's classmate Logan Zurita McKinnon ’24 as an American Song Archives summer intern. 

Prior to this summer, Schefer had museum experience with family programming, restoration projects and visitor reception, but he’d never worked directly on designing exhibitions. He’s learning practical techniques for writing labels and arranging objects in a way that offers viewers compelling and meaningful juxtapositions, while also tangling with the process of archive digitization—both its benefits and challenges. The work presents a “sweet spot,” he said, between his interest in museums and a growing fascination with archives and library science that he’s developed while at Haverford.

“This opportunity will allow me to explore their intersections while allowing me to get acquainted with the operations of institutions outside of the East Coast sphere where I have lived my entire life,” Schefer said.

Studying history has taught him to appreciate how individuals such as Guthrie, Dylan, and Ochs both mold and are molded by greater cultural trends. As he’s dipped into the archives this summer, Schefer said, his internship has revealed to him the role of these artists “as active participants in American history,” who spoke up about  the inequalities of their time.

Going forward, he plans to carry with him much of what he’s learned from folk music. “I hope to adapt my historical writing into a multimedia format that can convey the feeling of a moment in time and elucidate its lasting effects on how we understand American life,” he said.

—Ben Seal