Ben Sandmel is a New Orleans-based journalist, folklorist, musician, and producer.   Sandmel is the author of Zydeco!, a collaborative book with photographer Rick Olivier, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1999. Sandmel has written the liner notes for over 100 albums, discussing such indigenous American genres as blues, Cajun music and zydeco, R&B and soul, country, bluegrass, rockabilly, and gospel. During the past three decades he has also contributed articles on music, regional culture, travel and white-water canoeing to publications including The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, the Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, Esquire, Down Beat, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Scottish Life, American Way, MOJO, The Word, Delta Sky, River, and Car & Travel. His work appears in the anthologies From Jubilee to Hip Hop: African American Music Since Reconstruction,  published by Prentice-Hall in 2009, and Accordions, Fiddles, Two-Steps & Swing: A Cajun Music Reader, published by the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 2006 Sandmel wrote the display copy for an extensive exhibit on music for the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge. In 2007 he was a finalist in the New Orleans-based William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, for the short story “The End of His Rope.”

Sandmel’s article "Mister K-Doe Goes To Washington,”  first published in New Orleans in Gambit Weekly, was anthologized in DaCapo Best Music Writing 2000, edited by Peter Guralnick. Sandmel is currently completing work on a book about the subject of that article – the late New Orleans rhythm & blues singer Ernie K-Doe – with support from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation.

Sandmel has played drums professionally since the late 1970s, beginning with the Chicago blues idiom while working, free-lance, for such icons as Sunnyland Slim, Junior Wells, and Jimmy Johnson. Upon moving to Louisiana in 1982, Sandmel began playing with the late New Orleans blues guitarist Boogie Bill Webb. In 1986 Sandmel produced Webb’s first full album, Drinkin’ & Stinkin’ for the Louisiana Folklife Recording Series. In 1987 Sandmel began playing with The Hackberry Ramblers, a Cajun/western swing band formed in 1933 that still featured its two original co-founders. Sandmel produced two albums by the band, including 1997's Grammy-nominated Deep Water, which he released on his own label, Hot Biscuits. Working with director John Whitehead, Sandmel co-produced the documentary film Make ‘Em Dance: The Hackberry Ramblers’ Story, which was nationally telecast on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2004. The Hackberry Ramblers remained active until 2005.

Since 1983 Sandmel has worked for the state-funded Louisiana Folklife Program as a field researcher, documenting blues, gospel, and country music, Jewish folklore, and the occupational folklore of the oilfield and the Mississippi River. In 2008 - 2009 he served as the Louisiana Folklorist for the traveling exhibition New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music, co-presented by the Smithsonian Institution and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, as part of the on-going series Museum on Main Street. Sandmel produces the oral history and interview venue, The Music Heritage Stage, at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and conducts many of the interviews that are presented there. In 2007 he received a Gulf Coast Archiving and Preservation Grant from the Grammy Foundation.

In 1976 Sandmel graduated from Indiana University with a B.A. in Folklore. Currently he is a research scholar at the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans.