Bruce Conforth


Bruce Michael Conforth is an American musician, museum curator and academic. He was the first curator of Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Early years

Conforth was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and grew up in New Jersey and New York City. He became an artist and musician at an early age. In 1966 he appeared on an album called It's Happening Here as the bass player for a band called The Nightwatch. The liner notes read as follows:

Too Long - The Nightwatch

He was an athlete in high school, winning several letters and medals for his abilities as a long jumper, quarter-miler, and a member of the mile-relay team.

The 1960s

Conforth joined the early 1960s folk scene in New York City's Greenwich Village. He knew, and studied with performers such as Dave Van Ronk, Happy and Artie Traum, Izzy Young, Reverend Gary Davis, and Allen Ginsberg. He frequented Izzy Young's Folklore Center, the Fretted Instruments music center, The Cafe Au Go Go, Cafe Wha?, The Balloon Farm in the East Village, the 8th Street Bookstore, and Washington Square Park.
During this time he also made the acquaintance of Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and began his interest in altered states of consciousness.
Conforth received a scholarship to art school after graduation from high school and while enrolled spent one summer as an apprentice to the American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning at the latter's Springs, New York studio.
He had several shows of his work but then seemed to have dropped painting to turn his attention to music. He played with several bands during this time, although their exact names are unknown.

The 1970s

Conforth was a member of a band called Ruby and the Dykes, which toured the East Coast. He also played with a band called The Shook, and was a friend of John Sinclair manager of the MC5.
In 1973 he was the editor of a short-lived literary magazine called Slowglass whose contributors included Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, and John Lennon.
In 1977 he appeared as "Josh Hawkins" on an album called "Ragtime, Blues and Jive" and performed under that name around the East Coast and at the Middletown Folk Festival in Middletown, New Jersey.

The 1980s

In 1980 Conforth began attending graduate school at Indiana University, where he majored in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American Studies. He married the former Jeanne Harrah and they combined their last names; for the next decade he was known as Bruce Harrah-Conforth. He continued to play music, appearing in a local band called The Extremes. While at Indiana University he worked at the University's Archives of Traditional Music, contributing a number of articles to their newsletter "Resound". More importantly it was through his work at the Archives that he became involved with the still relatively unknown collection of African-American folk recordings of Lawrence Gellert. He produced two albums of songs from this collection. The first, in 1982, was on Rounder Records,"Cap'n You're So mean" was recognized by the Library of Congress as one of that year's most outstanding folk recordings. The second, "Nobody Knows My Name" was issued by the English company Heritage Records in 1984.
Norm Cohen reviewed these albums for The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 99, No. 391, pp. 102–117

Cap'n You're So Mean: Negro Songs of Protest, Vol. 2. Twenty-four previously unpublished field recordings mostly of protest songs, collected in the southern states in the 1920s
and 1930s by Lawrence Gellert.
Gellert's field collecting in the south, which resulted in some remarkably candid protest material has been neglected too long..

Conforth wrote his 1984 Master's thesis on the collection: "Laughing Just to Keep from Crying: Afro-American Folksong and the Field Recordings of Lawrence Gellert"
In 1985 Conforth completed his PhD, which was titled "The Rise and Fall of a Modern Folk Community: Haight-Ashbury 1965-1967." It contains many interviews with the founding musicians of the "San Francisco Sound."

Altered states of consciousness research

During the 1980s Harrah-Conforth became involved in researching the use of light and sound stimulation in inducing altered states of consciousness in humans. He produced a work titled "Accessing Alternity" that described the history of man's quest into this area. His research into this field has been cited as a hallmark of its kind. In "A History of Light and Sound", Michael Hutchison wrote:

"In 1990 Bruce Harrah-Conforth, Ph.D., of Indiana University completed a controlled study.... The report by Harrah-Conforth suggests that sound and light devices may cause simultaneous ergotropic arousal, or arousal of the sympathetic nervous system and the cerebral cortex, associated with 'creative' and 'ecstatic experiences,' and trophotropic arousal, or the arousal of the parasympathetic system, associated with deep relaxation and 'the timeless, "oceanic" mode of the mystic experience.' In humans, Dr. Harrah-Conforth concludes, 'these two states may be interpreted as hyper- and hypo- arousal, or ecstasy and samadhi.'"

Harrah-Conforth wrote in Megabrain Report: "I have little doubt that brain entrainment technology is a highly effective means of inducing changes in consciousness. The evolution of human consciousness is a tangibly manipulable process. We can control our destiny. It would appear as though brain entrainment will be among the technologies leading the way."

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

In May 1991 he was named the founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. His initial duties were to create the collections for the Museum. Among the artists he worked with were The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, U2, Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, B. B. King, The Everly Brothers, The Kinks, Jeff Beck, Tom Petty, The Yardbirds, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Eric Burdon, Dire Straits, Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, The Doors, James Brown, Carl Perkins, and The Eagles, some of whom he had known during his own days as a performer. The early years of the Rock Hall saw some tensions develop friction between the two boards of directors: one in Cleveland made of local businessmen, and one in New York City populated by industry executives such as Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine. With the construction of the building almost complete, Conforth left the job. He was alleged to have written a tell-all book called "Don't Rock the Hall" but the work has never been published.

The 1990s: the Himalayas, Tibetan Buddhism, and Castalia II

After leaving the Museum, Conforth was appointed one of six "founding faculty" designated to create the programs for a "New College of Global Studies" being created by Radford University in Radford, Virginia. While there he worked with noted neuro-psychologist Dr. Karl Pribram at his Center for Brain Research.
In 1995 Conforth took his first trip to Nepal and immediately developed a deep interest in the region and in the religion of Tibetan Buddhism. For the following five years he worked as a trekking guide in that area. The New College eventually closed when Virginia Governor George Allen stripped its budget.
In 1996 Conforth founded Castalia II, an organization dedicated to the exploration of consciousness. Board members included Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. Charles Tart, Dr. John Beresford, physicist Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, and other "psychedelic" notables.

2000

In 2000, Conforth was appointed Director of the Jewel Heart Center for Tibetan Buddhism and Culture in Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded by the Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche. He also began teaching part-time at the University of Michigan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, with charitable donations drying up, he left Jewel Heart in 2004 and became a full-time member of the University's Program in American Culture.

Teaching at UM

As part of the American Culture Department Conforth developed and taught the following courses, all approved by LSA Curriculum Committee:
AC208: Post WWII American Subcultural Groups
AC209: History of American Popular Music
AC219: Survey of American Folklore
AC337: Survey of American Blues Music: History, Literature, Myth
AC357: Performance Studies: Context, Content, and Analysis
AC405: Upper Level Seminar in Post WWII American Blues Music
AC407: American Folk Music: Culture, Politics, Music
AC409: Immersion in American Roots Music
These were some of the most popular courses at the University.
On March 14, 2012, Conforth received the University of Michigan's Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching.

Recent publications and research

In May, 2013 Conforth's book African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story, was published by Scarecrow Press, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield publishers. Conforth taught folklore, blues music, popular culture, and the history of social movements at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor until 2017.
His current work includes researching the life of bluesman Robert Johnson; a 2008 publication concerned Isaiah "Ike" Zimmerman, Johnson's main guitar mentor. In 2013 he published the article "The Death of Robert Johnson's Wife" discussing Johnson's wife Virginia Travis and her untimely death during childbirth. He once again published an article on Robert Johnson titled "The Business of Robert Johnson Fakery". The article discussed the identity theft and unscrupulous business of falsely authenticating material supposedly associated with Johnson.
In June 2019 Conforth co-authored, with blues scholar and author Gayle Dean Wardlow, the definitive Johnson biography, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, published by Chicago Review Press. The book has been called "the definitive Robert Johnson biography", "the book the blues world has been waiting for", and "a tremendously important work. It not only finally reveals everything we wanted to know about Robert Johnson, but will rewrite the history of the blues". The book won the 2020 Penderyn Prize for being the best music book of any type for 2019.