Don Yoder

YODER, Don.  b. Altoona, Pennsylvania, 1921; d. Devon, Pennsylvania, 11 August 2015.  Distinguished folklorist and church historian, Yoder attended Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, (BA, 1942), and the University of Chicago (PhD in American Church History, 1947, dissertation, ‘Church Union Efforts of the Reformed Church in the United States to 1934’). His early faculty positions were at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and his alma mater, Franklin and Marshall College, where he began academic research into, and field collection of, the largely unwritten religious song traditions of the ‘bush-meeting Dutch’.  His...