George Foss was born in Miami, Florida, in 1932. He lived there until finishing high-school in 1950.

          After graduating from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, he joined the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. as a trumpeter.

          During his stay in Washington, he completed a graduate degree at American University and began the first of many field trips into the nearby Blue Ridge region of Virginia collecting the ballads, folksongs and instrumental pieces of the settlers there. Later he expanded his collection of traditional folk music to the Cumberlands of Kentucky, the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina and the Arkansas Ozarks.

          In 1964, Foss joined the faculty at Louisiana State University teaching trumpet, music theory, music history and appreciation as well as folkmusic. He continued his collecting, aided by grants from the American Philosophical Society and Louisiana State University, and these collections have been duplicated and archived in the Library of Congress Folklore Archive, Washington D. C.; The University of Texas, Austin, Texas; and the LSU Archive of Oral History, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

          Foss co-authored a textbook, Anglo-American Folksong Style, with Roger Abrahams, and was music editor of A Singer and Her Songs based on the life of Almeda Riddle, the noted Ozark ballad singer. He has also written many articles and short works on American folkmusic and folk instruments such as the autoharp and the Native-American flute.

          Foss retired from his professorship at LSU in 1989 and moved with his wife Nancy to Greer's Ferry, Arkansas. George has remained active in his writing and study of various aspects of folkmusic, and he and Nancy have been active in performing at the nearby Ozark Folk Center.

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