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Posted by: Stephanie Hall
Happy Chinese New Year! The Year of the Rooster begins on Saturday, January 28th. To celebrate, here are four recordings of Chinese music recorded on Victor in 1902 and 1903. We hope that someone reading this article might be able to tell us more about these songs. The recordings are part of the collections of …
Posted in: Asian American History, Chinese Americans, Folk Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In my first post about the fascinating character known as Far Away Moses, whose face adorns the outside of the Jefferson Building where the AFC is located, I covered the basics of his life and mentioned some of the ways in which his story became part of the folklore of the late 19th and early …
Posted in: AFC History, Far-Away Moses, Jewish American History, Jewish Americans, Tourism, Weddings
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post by the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax curator Todd Harvey. Fans of folk music fire up your browsers! The second—and largest—phase of the Lomax family papers has just gone online at this link. This set of manuscripts joins ca. 25,000 items that went online last fall. Researchers now have access to nearly …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Archival Practice
Posted by: Stephen Winick
On behalf of the American Folklife Center, I’m very sad to pass on the news of the death of our founding director, Alan Jabbour. Alan was a folklorist, fiddler, fieldworker, and friend of the highest caliber, and he will be missed at AFC and around the world. AFC’s current director, Betsy Peterson, expressed the feelings …
Posted in: AFC 40th Anniversary, AFC Events, AFC History, Alan Jabbour, Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series, Fieldwork, Folk Music, Folklorists, Obituaries
Posted by: Guha Shankar
In remembrance of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s birthday, the Library of Congress and other federal agencies, will be closed on Monday, January 16th (to be faithful to the facts, the Reverend’s actual birthday is January 15, 1929). To commemorate the occasion, this blog draws from the American Folklife Center’s documentary collections to present selected …
Posted in: 1965, African American History, African Americans, Civil Rights, Freedom Struggle, Glen Pearcy Collection, Holidays, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King, Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March, SNCC
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
Friday the 13th may be considered an unlucky day in some parts of Europe and in North America. For some, the day can cause great anxiety, called paraskevidekatriaphobia, meaning fear of Friday the 13th. The idea that Friday the 13th is unlucky is not very old. It seems to have arisen in the 19th century. …
Posted in: Beliefs
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: the following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a former staff member who participated in many of AFC’s field projects in the 1970s and 1980s. This blog celebrates the life of Geraldine Niva Johnson, who passed away on November 16, 2016. Gerri was a folklorist who specialized in women’s crafts, especially woven rag …
Posted in: Fieldwork, Folk Art, Folklorists, Obituaries, Quilts, Textile arts
Posted by: Megan Harris
As a kid, I hated milk. Unfortunately for me, it was a requisite part of dinner at my house. I remember sitting alone at the dinner table long after everyone else had left it, unwilling to drink my glass of milk so that I might be excused. Nowadays, I will happily gulp down a latte …
Posted in: Foodways, World War II
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The American Folklife Center is pleased to welcome John B. Fenn III as the Head of the Research and Programs section. Fenn will be supervising the members of our staff involved in public programming, publications, research, and training in the field of folklife. John Fenn’s academic training is in folklore and ethnomusicology (Ph.D., Indiana University, …
Posted in: Uncategorized