Just in time for the start of a new school year, the American Folklife Center has posted to its website a wonderful new collection of Occupational Folklife Project interviews documenting Teaching in Wisconsin Classrooms. This important resource features in-depth interviews with 32 dedicated, resourceful and creative elementary teachers throughout the state of Wisconsin. Given the essential role played by American teachers, it is perhaps surprising that the AFC archive previously contained so few first-person narratives by classroom teachers documenting their work lives. This collection begins to address that gap.
Summer is over, and autumn is here. That means the Homegrown 2021 concert series is also drawing to a close. We put a selection of songs from the series on the Folklife Today podcast, with commentary from me, John Fenn, series producer Thea Austen, and AFC interns Kennedi Johnson and Camille Acosta. That way, if you haven't had a chance to watch the videos, you can download and listen wherever you like to hear your podcasts. As usual, there are links to the podcast itself, plus links to relevant blog posts, videos, and audio selections in this post.
This post gives background to our latest episode of the Folklife Today podcast. This episode continues our look at songs about summer, from the amorous adventures of young lovers to the backbreaking work done by convicts in the sun. Hosts John Fenn and Stephen Winick, along with guest Jennifer Cutting, present their favorite summer songs. Songs include the English “Sweet Primroses;” the Trinidadian “One Fine Summer’s Morning” and “June Come, You No Marry;” the Tuvan “In Summer Pastures;” the African American work song “Worked All Summer Long;” and the Basque “When the Sun Shines Everywhere, How Good the Shade is!”
The following is a guest blog post by liaison specialist Owen Rogers and is meant to supplement the Veterans History Project’s (VHP) Conducting Virtual Oral History Interviews in Light of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Check back next week to learn more about interviewing veterans in person during the COVID-19 pandemic. When I first began recording veterans’ …
We're excited for this week’s Homegrown concert from Hubby Jenkins, who will be playing old-time songs and spirituals that are the root of American folk, country, blues, and gospel. The concert premieres at noon on August 11 on our Facebook page. After that, the concert will be available permanently at his concert page, where you can also read more about Hubby. For now, I’ll just say that he's an old-time and blues musician living in New York. He's a singer and multi-instrumentalist who plays guitars, banjos, mandolins, and bones. He has been a member of the Rhiannon Giddens Band, and before that the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops. As a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, he played at the Library of Congress back in 2012. In this post, I’ll try to whet your appetites by talking about a few of the songs Hubby plays in the concert, and presenting related field recordings from our collections.
The American Folklife Center is happy to announce a two-part series of hour-long online Zoom presentations with live Q&A featuring recent and current Archie Green Fellows discussing the impact of the pandemic on their fieldwork experiences. We're calling the event Occupational Folklife and Fieldwork in the Post-Pandemic World: Adaptation, Innovation, and the Future, Parts 1 & 2. Registration is required, but don't worry...you'll find the registration links down near the bottom of this post!
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) This time, though, there’s a twist: Ann Yao, who performed in the 2020 series, also presented a Homegrown concert way back in 2011 with the Ann …
Back near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we suggested a new challenge to keep folks busy while waiting out the worst at home. The idea was a variation on our popular "Archive Challenge," in which you base a work of art on an item in our archive. This post suggests ideas for archive challenges that might appeal to active-duty service members and veterans, and sets up a future post about Veterans History Project collections.
As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been working with No Depression, The Journal of Roots Music, which is published by the nonprofit Freshgrass Foundation. They’re publishing a column called Roots in the Archive, featuring content from the American Folklife Center and Folklife Today. Find the series at this link, over at their website! The latest Roots in …