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Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post from Todd Harvey, a curator and reference specialist at the American Folklife Center archives, Library of Congress. It is a banner day when John Cohen visits the American Folklife Center. We greet him as an old friend, though in truth John has a longer association with the Center and …
Posted in: Folk Music, John Cohen, Old Time Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The staff of the American Folklife Center wishes you all the best for the Holiday season and the coming year. In this picture, we pose by the Christmas Tree in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, with some of us still in the costumes we wore in the AFC Mummers Play, St. George, …
Posted in: Holidays
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: 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 performance that tours the halls of the Library of Congress. Dressed in costumes that range from striking to silly, we sing, act, rhyme, and dance …
Posted in: Dance, Drama, Folk Drama, Holidays, Mumming
Posted by: Stephen Winick
There’s been a new discovery and new research into Alan Lomax’s fieldwork in the 1930s! On the John W. Kluge Center’s blog Insights, Antony Stewart, British Research Council Fellow at The Kluge Center, describes a notebook recently discovered by AFC’s Alan Lomax curator, Todd Harvey. The notebook was used by Lomax during his 1936-1937 field …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Haiti
Posted by: Stephen Winick
If you’ve just subscribed to our blog, or missed some of our previous posts, let me fill you in on one of the American Folklife Center’s projects: we’re collecting 2014 photos of Halloween, Día de los Muertos, and other holidays that fall at the turn of October to November. Although we collected hundreds of photos …
Posted in: Halloween, Holidays, Photographs
Posted by: Stephen Winick
If you’ve been following Folklife Today recently, you’ll know that we’re in the midst of collecting people’s photos of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos in a new online collecting initiative. We still want you to share your photos! Find out how in our previous blog posts featuring an overview of the project and step-by-step …
Posted in: Archival Practice, Halloween, Holidays
Posted by: Stephen Winick
It’s hard to believe, but October 30, 2014 is the first anniversary of Folklife Today! A lot can happen in a year, so we thought we’d take a little trip through the highlights of our first year. I’ll begin with the sad things. Just three months after our debut, the great folksinger Pete Seeger died, …
Posted in: AFC Events, AFC History, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The Following is a guest post by Judith Gray, ethnomusicologist and coordinator of reference in the American Folklife Center. In the last decades of the 19th century, Thomas Edison and his contemporaries in Europe created various devices for capturing sound [1]. These inventions, in turn, led to the creation of audiovisual archives. The first two …
Posted in: Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
FolklifeHalloween2014 is underway! This is the first day we’ve asked people to share their Halloween and Day of the Dead photos on Flickr with the tag #FolklifeHalloween2014. Of course, a few early birds had already begun to use the tag last week, like Daniel Baker, whose photo from 2009 is above. Others shared photos of …
Posted in: Halloween, Holidays, Photographs