Top of page

Beyoncé, Paul Bowles, and More: Current GRAMMY Nominees with AFC Connections on the Library of Congress Blog

Share this post:

Note: This is just a teaser for a fuller post over at the Library of Congress Blog. Read the full story there!

By Kristopher Harris from Charlotte, NC - DSC03829. On the Wikimedia Commons with a Creative Commons License CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54519266
Put a GRAMMY on it!  Beyoncé in 2016, by Kristopher Harris from Charlotte, NC – DSC03829. On the Wikimedia Commons with a Creative Commons License CC BY 2.0

This year the GRAMMY awards promise to be exciting for music fans everywhere, but especially fans of the American Folklife Center.  At least four of the nominees have connections to the AFC archive: Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” from the album Lemonade, which uses samples of two songs from the Alan Lomax collection; a box set  of Moroccan music recorded for the archive by the author and composer Paul Bowles in the 1950s called Music of Morocco from the Library of Congress; a box set of early recordings of the sacred songs of Protestant camp meetings and revivals from the 1890s called Waxing the Gospel, which includes two recordings from the archive; and I Wanna Sing Right: Rediscovering Lomax in the Evangeline Country, presenting contemporary Louisiana artists performing their own versions of songs they learned from John and Alan Lomax’s 1934 field recordings from coastal Louisiana.

Obviously, we’re excited that so much material from our archive is either up for a GRAMMY itself, or inspiring creative artists to make their own GRAMMY-nominated music. We wish all the artists and labels good luck, and to the GRAMMY voters we can only say, “If you like it, then you better put a GRAMMY on it!”

Read more about these works, their connections to the archive, and the GRAMMYs they’re nominated for, all over at the Library of Congress Blog!

Comments (2)

  1. It’s one thing to discuss use of material from this or that archive. It’s notable. But the article’s “We wish all the artists and labels good luck, and to the GRAMMY voters we can only say, ‘If you like it, then you better put a GRAMMY on it!'” sounds like an advertisement.

    • Thanks for your comment. We do not endorse any nominee. As the post says, we wish ALL the artists and labels good luck, whether they used archival material or not. The second comment conveys that the voters should vote for the nominees they like, not any particular nominee. (In any case, voting had been over for some time by the time this post was made.) In neither case do we mean to suggest that any particular nominee should win.

Add a Comment

This blog is governed by the general rules of respectful civil discourse. You are fully responsible for everything that you post. The content of all comments is released into the public domain unless clearly stated otherwise. The Library of Congress does not control the content posted. Nevertheless, the Library of Congress may monitor any user-generated content as it chooses and reserves the right to remove content for any reason whatever, without consent. Gratuitous links to sites are viewed as spam and may result in removed comments. We further reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to remove a user's privilege to post content on the Library site. Read our Comment and Posting Policy.


Required fields are indicated with an * asterisk.