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Archive: August 2014 (4 Posts)

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

Work Songs and Other Laborlore for Labor Day

Posted by: Stephen Winick

With Labor Day approaching, I’d love to introduce you to some of our resources on the folklore and folklife of labor. This area of study has many names, from the more formal “occupational folk culture” to the more colloquial “laborlore.”  It also has many sub-areas, from the study of occupational folk speech, including jargon, to …

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

The Two First “Folk-Lore” Columns

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This post presents two primary source documents, both in the public domain, which are difficult to find online. Both relate to my previous post on William John Thoms. They are the first two columns in Thoms’ series “Folk-Lore,” which ran in the journal The Athenæum from 1846 to 1849, and in Notes & Queries from …

A man sits at a desk reading a book.

“He Coined the Word ‘Folk-Lore'”: The “Old Folk-Lorist” William John Thoms

Posted by: Stephen Winick

August 22 is an important date to folklore fans.  It is, in fact, the anniversary of the first appearance of the (originally hyphenated) word “Folk-Lore” in print. The medium was a letter to the editor of the Athenæum, a scholarly journal, and the author was William John Thoms, although he wrote the letter under his …

Three women hold fiddles

The Quebe Sisters: Western Swing & Texas-Style Fiddle

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The following is a guest post by Charles Lockwood, the Operations & Development Director of Texas Folklife, Austin Texas. Mr. Lockwood has an MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Quebe Sisters Band performed in AFC’s Homegrown Concert Series on August 20, 2014. See the concert in the player below: While …