Scott Alarik

Singer-songwriter-journalist-author Scott Alarik was a fixture on the New England folk scene from his arrival in Boston in the early 1980s until his untimely death in December 2021. A Minnesota native, he was born in 1951 and came of age during the tumult of the ‘60s, refusing to register for the draft and ultimately serving 19 months in federal prison. Upon his release in ‘72, he became a touring folk singer, performing often on A Prairie Home Companion and at iconic venues such as Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, Caffé Lena and The Speakeasy in New York City and Passim in Cambridge.

Alarik recorded his first album, Stories, in 1978, and his second in 1981 (the latter with the New Prairie Ramblers, the Prairie Home Companion house band). Drawn to New England’s vibrant folk scene, he relocated to the Boston/Cambridge area and started covering the folk scene for The Boston Globe. In that capacity, he furthered the careers of countless local and national artists, reviewing concerts and LPs while writing blurbs and liner notes for everyone from Ellis Paul and Alison Krauss to Vance Gilbert and Ani DiFranco.

In 1991, he founded the New England Folk Almanac, which gave in-depth coverage to happenings in contemporary, traditional and Celtic folk music. After NEFA ceased publication in 1997, Alarik collected many of his essays and articles into the book Deep Community: Adventures in the Modern Folk Underground, published in 2003. In 2011, he published the novel Revival, also set in the folk music world, which won the IBPA’s Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Popular Fiction.

Alarik performed live consistently through the year and recorded the album All That Is True in 2007. He also became an in-demand emcee at folk festivals such as Falcon Ridge and a radio personality in his own right on WUMB’s Folk Tales. In all his guises, he was a walking encyclopedia of folk music and a first-class storyteller and raconteur. The New England folk scene owes him a huge collective debt for keeping folk music visible (and audible) well into the new millennium.

(by Terry Kitchen)