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A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

St. George and the Data Dragon: A Digital Assets Mumming

Posted by: Stephen Winick

St. George and the Data Dragon: A Digital Assets Mumming Performed by American Folklife Center Staff with Guests Script drawn from multiple plays in the James Madison Carpenter Collection. Compiled by Stephen Winick, with additional material by Stephen Winick, Jennifer Cutting, Theadocia Austen, Hope O’Keeffe, and the company. Digital assets jargon courtesy of Bertram Lyons.  …

Mumming at the American Folklife Center

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This post gives general background to our mumming tradition. For more posts with play texts, videos, audio, and scholarship on the background, please visit this link. Every year, in the week before Christmas, staff members of the American Folklife Center put our research and performance skills into play, bringing collections to life in a dramatic …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Songs of the Winter Season Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

There are many examples of songs of the winter season available among the online presentations from the American Folklife Center’s archive, but the largest group of these is found in California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties, a documentary project of the California Work Projects Administration headed by Sidney Robertson Cowell from 1938 …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Symposium sparks broad discussion of ethnographic archives

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

In the weeks since The American Folklife Center hosted the Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium at the Library of Congress, we have learned about several collaborations that developed at the event. Fellow panelists are now co-authoring an article, others are creating a consortial grant application, and attendees from the same city who first met at the symposium …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Indigenous American Cylinder Recordings and the American Folklife Center

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

As November is Native American Heritage Month, it seems a good opportunity to talk about some of the services the American Folklife Center provides for American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, and for those who wish to learn more about them. The archival collections of the Library of Congress include the largest body of …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Putting Foods By for Winter

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

This time of year in the northern hemisphere, agricultural communities celebrate the last harvest of the growing season. A great deal of work goes into the raising of food for our tables. Before electric refrigerators and local grocery stores, people also needed to work throughout the growing season to preserve food. The completion of that …