Don Yoder is a musician and folklorist. In the 1950s, he was on the faculty of Franklin and Marshall College. In the 1960s, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was initially on the faculty of the Department of Religious Thought and later in the Department of Folklore and Folklife
Yoder is the author of several books, many of them having to do with the lives of German immigrants in Pennsylvania. One of his prime research interests is the Evangelical United Brethren Church. Yoder's works include: Songs Along the Mahantongo: Pennsylvania Dutch Folk-Songs (with Walter E. Boyer and Albert F. Buffington, 1951); Pennsylvania Spirituals (1962); American Folklife (ed., 1976); Pennsylvania German Immigrants, 1709-1786 (1980); Rhineland Emigrants: Lists of German Settlers in Colonial America (ed., 1981); Decorated Furniture of the Mahantongo Valley (essay contributed, 1987); Discovering American Folklife: Studies in Ethnic, Religious, and Regional Culture (1990).
From the guide to the Don. Yoder Papers, 1890s-1990, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)
