Rhiannon Giddens is a North Carolina-born singer, songwriter, and musician based in Limerick, Ireland. A founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, she has pursued a solo career since 2014 while also participating in a series of prominent collaborations, including in Our Native Daughters. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize in music. In 2023, her TV series My Music debuted on PBS.

Patrick Huber is a historian and editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He is the author of six books, including Linthead Stomp, The Hank Williams Reader, and A&R Pioneers. Before joining the museum staff in March 2022, he taught history at Missouri University of Science and Technology for more than twenty years.

Bill Ivey served as director of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum from 1971 to 1998. A past national president and chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he has written three books about U.S. cultural policy as well as numerous articles about country and popular music.

Bill C. Malone, professor emeritus of history at Tulane University, is the author of Country Music, U.S.A., Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, Southern Music/American Music, and Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers. He served as music editor for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and as a consultant and commentator for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series Country Music.

Rissi Palmer is a country singer and songwriter originally from Pennsylvania. She hosts the Apple Music radio show Color Me Country with Rissi Palmer, serves as a special correspondent for CMT, and was profiled in a 2023 episode of PBS’s American Masters.

Claudia Perry is a former pop music critic for the Newark Star Ledger. Her work has appeared in New Country, Texas Monthly, Request, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Houston Post, and San Jose Mercury News. She was also a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee for seventeen years.

Before his retirement in 2020, John W. Rumble served as the longtime historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He has written for the Journal of Country Music, South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. He has also contributed liner notes to many historical collections of country recordings, including the four-CD boxed set The Music of Bill Monroe, 1936–1994, for which he served as compiler.

Ron Wynn is a freelance writer based in Nashville. Formerly, he served as music critic for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and the Post-Telegram of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Wynn contributed to Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story and in 2023 was honored with a Keeping the Blues Alive Award from the Blues Foundation.

Angela Stefano Zimmer is a writer and editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Originally from Buffalo, New York, she has been writing professionally since age fourteen and, prior to joining the Hall of Fame in November 2021, spent seven years as editor-in-chief of the website The Boot.