Dr. Susan O. Friedman is a retired academic in a field far removed from music. As a child, she sang in Girl Scouts and at summer camp without knowing that most of the songs were "folk music." In the early 1960s, her father began to bring home records of Harry Belafonte, the Clancy Brothers, and Joan Baez. Susan fell in love with ballads from hearing Joan Baez sing some of them. In college and later, there was usually at least one song circle in which she could participate.

With her partner, Dick Greenhaus, Susan started the Digital Tradition, a database with the lyrics to 11,000 folksongs, and tunes to about half of them, in 1988. Initially distributed on floppy discs, it was posted on the internet a few years later, initially on a Xerox site and then at Mudcat.org since the mid-1990s. She has also assisted with Dick's company CAMSCO Music, initially selling traditional folk music CDs and now concentrating on book publishing.