Charles Haywood

Charles Haywood (Cibulsky) was born in Grodno, in what is now Belarus, on 20 December 1904 or 2 January 1905, depending on the source, and died in New York on 12 June 2000. An American musicologist and ethnomusicologist of Russian origin, his work focuses on American popular music, folk song and the presence of Shakespeare in music, fields in which he left a body of bibliographical work that is still regarded as a standard reference.

He arrived in the United States in 1916 and was trained in New York. He studied at the City College and then obtained diplomas from the New York Institute of Musical Art and the Juilliard Graduate School of Music. During these years he worked as an opera singer, lieder performer and popular singer. He completed his education at Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1940 and a doctorate in 1946, and studied musicology, anthropology and pedagogy. From 1939 to 1973 he taught music at Queens College of the City University of New York, and he also taught as a visiting professor at several American universities.

Haywood was actively involved in professional societies. He served on the council of the Society for Ethnomusicology and on the executive committee of the International Folk Music Council, where he edited the yearbook from 1971 to 1973 and went on to chair the American national committee. He held a Fulbright research chair in Austria in 1961–1962 and again in 1967–1968.

His legacy endures above all in his Bibliography of North American Folklore and Folksong, which remains a primary source for ethnomusicological research on North America. In addition, in the early 1980s he donated to the University of Victoria his unpublished bibliography of more than 50,000 entries on music inspired by Shakespeare, now known as The Charles Haywood Collection.