Matthew Gilbert

Matthew Gilbert is a singer-songwriter and scholar of twentieth-century American folk music. He received his B.A. in Musicology from UCLA and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Stanford University, where he holds a dissertation fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

His dissertation, "Blow for Californi-o: Histories of Folk Music in the American West," charts an alternative history of American folk music that reclaims California and the Southwest as central ideological linchpins in a series of transformations that birthed an American folksong canon, the discipline of ethnomusicology, the country music industry, and the 1960s American folk revival. He theorizes how “musical geographies” developed by folklorists and musicologists in the twentieth century to explain the relationship between movement, difference, and culture continue to constrain and orient scholarly narratives about musical life in the United States today. Combining archival research with critical ethnographic theory, his work demonstrates how the writing and telling of American music history is implicated in the very story it seeks to tell.

His musical practice is grounded in the singer-songwriter tradition of Laurel Canyon and takes particular inspiration from Joni Mitchell, while also incorporating influences from American roots musicians Lucinda Williams and John Prine, and freak-folk progenitors Judee Sill and Kath Bloom. He has designed and taught two courses at Stanford: MUSIC 20AX: The Singer-Songwriter and American Popular Culture (Summer 2024) and CSRE 19: Music and Race in the United States (Summer 2025 & Summer 2026).