Bucky Halker is a veteran Chicago songwriter, scholar, and performer with fifteen albums and a host of honors and awards.  In the summer of 2015, Halker completed a tribute CD to martyred labor songwriter Joe Hill (1879-1915) entitled Anywhere But Utah.  Bucky Halker’s 2012 original music tribute to folksong legend Woody Guthrie, The Ghost of Woody Guthrie, fused elements of folk, blues, honky-tonk country, rock, and jazz; and on Welcome to Labor Land (2007) Halker offered eclectic renditions of historic labor protest songs from Illinois. 

Bucky, a Ph.D. in U.S. History, has lectured and published extensively on working-class protest music in America and has regularly toured Europe since 1990. He is the author of For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-1895 (University of Illinois Press) and the producer-scholar for the five-volume Folksongs of Illinois CD series.  

He received the prestigious Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress - American Folklife Center in 2012 and was elected into the Union Hall of Honor by Illinois Labor History Society in 2010.   In 2016 and 2020, Bucky was a guest professor at Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. 

Rick Kogan recently referred to Bucky as a "missionary, spreading the words and redefining folk music in new and vital and exciting ways.”  Chicago Tribune (March 23, 2014)