The Frontier

Richard 'Riley' Shepard was a minor country musician and con man who spent over 40 years single-handedly compiling an exhaustive, cross-referenced encyclopedia of American and Canadian folk music, a project that consumed his life and fractured his family.

By 1976, Shepard claimed to have alphabetically indexed over 43,000 song titles, which he stated were outgrowths of only 4,000 core songs and texts. He cross-referenced them with their published sources, all without a computer.

Shepard's daughter, Stascha, idolized him as a child but learned he was a compulsive liar and grifter. A pivotal moment came at age 12 when an elderly investor called to say Shepard had stolen his life savings.

Shepard's musical career included releasing a cover of 'Atomic Power' in 1946 and using numerous pseudonyms like Dick Scott and Johnny Rebel. He worked as an agent but was unreliable, often breaching contracts.

To fund his encyclopedia and lifestyle, Shepard conned investors, wrote porn under the name Zachary Quill, and constantly evaded creditors, leading his family to flee homes and live in poverty.

Folklorist Steve Winick found Shepard's unpublished encyclopedia, housed in the Library of Congress as collection AFC 1979-008, to be a significant and unknown attempt in the history of American folk song scholarship.

Shepard's work involved analyzing song provenance, like tracing the shanty 'Hullabaloo Joe' from British sailors to an Americanized version, and providing musical notation and source citations for thousands of entries.

The Library of Congress showed interest but could not publish his encyclopedia in 1979. Shepard lamented the lack of a computer to digitize his work, becoming an early casualty of the transition from paper to digital archives.

Shepard abandoned his family in 1983. In his final years, he was supported by friend Ted Enslin in Porterville, who funded the project and stored the 40 boxes of work, seeing genius in it despite the financial cost.

After his death in 2009, Shepard's work was dispersed. Copies went to Nashville, the Buck Owens Museum in Bakersfield, and private hands. His daughter later bought one copy from investors for $500.

Steve Winick argues all folk song scholars have 'something of the Riley Shepard' in them - a desire to be immersed in the material - but Shepard sacrificed everything, including his personal life, for that immersion.