Elijah Wald was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959. He started playing guitar at age seven, after reading Woody Guthrie's autobiography and deciding that he would spend his life as a wandering minstrel. He hitchhiked across the United States for the first time in 1975, after the bus he was taking out of San Francisco broke down in Reno, and discovered the world of the long-haul truckers and the pleasures of a night spent rolling over the Rocky Mountains.

After a year in Greenwich Village, studying guitar and drinking till dawn with the legendary Dave Van Ronk, he went off to Europe at age eighteen to seek his fortune as an itinerant troubadour. He found that it was just as much fun as he had hoped, so spent most of the next dozen years roaming the world with his guitar, fronting a blues band in Sevilla, Spain, a swing trio in Antwerp, Belgium, and a rock band at the Grand Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, as well as studying with the Congolese masters Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edward Masengo in Lubumbashi, Zaire.

Back in the US, he toured as a folk-blues musician, performing in low dives and honky-tonks from Georgia to Vancouver and recording two albums: "Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker" (LP) and "Street Corner Cowboys" (CD). He has recorded as a sideman with Dave Van Ronk, and worked as accompanist to Eric Von Schmidt, Edouard Masengo, Josh White, Jr., and the legendary black string band virtuoso Howard Armstrong, with whom he toured off and on for several years.

In the early 1980s, he began writing for the Boston Globe, becoming the newspaper’s "world music" critic, as well as writing about books, films, and immigrant life in New England. Since leaving the Globe, he has published several books, including River of Song: A Musical Journey Down the Mississippi (St. Martin's), Josh White: Society Blues (UMass Press and Routledge), Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas (Rayo/HarperCollins), Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (Amistad/HarperCollins), and Van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (Da Capo). He has also written columns of political commentary for various websites, and done production and liner notes for various record projects, including The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection, for which he won a 2002 Grammy.

Wald currently lives in Los Angeles, but is often out on the road one place or another, and is contemplating a hitch from Alaska to Argentina, tentatively scheduled to begin on his fiftieth birthday.

Elijah Wald's extended biography