Bruce Conforth was the first curator of Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
21 Facts About Bruce Conforth
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Bruce Conforth became an artist and musician at an early age.
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Bruce Conforth 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.
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Bruce Conforth joined the early 1960s folk scene in New York City's Greenwich Village.
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Bruce Conforth said that he used to hang out at Izzy Young's Folklore Center, where he met Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Harry Belafonte, and others.
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In 1980, Bruce Conforth began attending graduate school at Indiana University Bloomington, where he majored in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American Studies.
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Bruce Conforth married the former Jeanne Harrah and they combined their last names; for the next decade, he was known as Bruce Harrah-Conforth.
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Bruce Conforth continued to play music, appearing in a local band called The Extremes.
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Bruce Conforth produced two albums of songs from this collection.
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Bruce 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".
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Bruce Conforth produced a work titled "Accessing Alternity" that described the history of man's quest into this area.
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Bruce Conforth was alleged to have written a tell-all book called "Don't Rock the Hall" but the work has never been published.
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In 1995, Bruce Conforth took his first trip to Nepal and immediately developed a deep interest in the region and in the religion of Tibetan Buddhism.
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In 2000, Bruce 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.
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Bruce Conforth began teaching part-time at the University of Michigan.
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Bruce Conforth left Jewel Heart in 2004 and became a full-time member of the university's Program in American Culture.
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On March 14,2012, Bruce Conforth received the University of Michigan's Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching.
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Bruce Conforth taught folklore, blues music, popular culture, and the history of social movements at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor until 2017.
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Bruce Conforth published an article on Robert Johnson titled "The Business of Robert Johnson Fakery".
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In June 2019, Bruce Conforth co-authored, with blues scholar and author Gayle Dean Wardlow, a biography of Johnson, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, published by Chicago Review Press.
21.
The lawsuits against Bruce Conforth were dismissed in 2024 for the same reason.