Richard K. Spottswood

On May 14, 2019, Spottswood appeared in a symposium at the Library of Congress celebrating his career.

Spottswood hosts a two-hour program called "The Dick Spottswood Show" on Bluegrass Country radio WAMU 88.5 HD-2 in Washington, DC and streaming on BluegrassCountry.org. He is an expert on bluegrass music (having co-founded Bluegrass Unlimited magazine in 1966) and on the history of recorded ethnic music of the early 20th century generally. Spottswood is a founding member of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and was awarded their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. On October 1, 2009, the International Bluegrass Music Association presented Spottswood with their Distinguished Service Award in Nashville, Tennessee. He appears briefly in the PBS documentary American Epic (2017).

Spottswood earned his B.A. from the University of Maryland in 1960, and his Master's degree in Library Science from Catholic University in 1962. The title of his Master's thesis was A catalog of American folk music on commercial recordings at the Library of Congress, 1923-1940. His masterwork, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893-1942 (University of Illinois Press, 1990), is a seven-volume listing of sound recordings by foreign language and minority groups issued in the U.S. until 1942. He also edited and annotated the 15-volume LP series Folk Music in America for the Library of Congress, and contributed to books including Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (2002) and contributed the essay "Caribbean and South American Recordings" to Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919.

Richard K. "Dick" Spottswood (born April 17, 1937) is an American musicologist and author from Maryland, United States who has catalogued and been responsible for the reissue of many thousands of recordings of vernacular music in the United States.