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Archive: August 2017 (8 Posts)

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

From “Mule-een” to New Orleans: Just What Was Lead Belly Saying?

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Introduction The great American songster Lead Belly, first recorded by John A. and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1933, is a towering figure in global popular music. In some cases, his influence can be clouded, or hard to understand, because of his own enigmatic personality and because of the fragmentary nature of …

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

Tracking Lomax’s 1952-53 Spain trip

Posted by: John Fenn

Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita is the current scholar in the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection, and has been using her time at the Library of Congress to explore materials held at the AFC related to Lomax’s 1952–53 field recording trip to Spain. In this recent guest post on the Kluge …

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

Honored and Blessed: My Summer Spent with Arkansas Veterans

Posted by: Lisa Taylor

The following is a guest post by Victoria Anderson, a summer intern in Sen. John Boozman’s (AR) Little Rock office. History may seem like a row of dusty old books sitting on a shelf, something people pass over because it looks boring, but I want to remind everyone that it is not. History is living …

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

Nicholas Ray: frustrated folklorist

Posted by: John Fenn

This blog post about the filmmaker Nicholas Ray is part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. Nicholas Ray (1911-1979)—iconoclastic filmmaker, writer, friend to trouble, and…folklorist? To those who know the name, Nicholas Ray is most readily recognized as the director who brought …

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

Nancy Yunhwa Rao Speaks About Chinese Opera

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The following is a guest post by Wendi Maloney of the Library’s Office of Communications. It is an excerpt of this longer post, which originally appeared on the Library of Congress Blog. Music scholar Nancy Yunhwa Rao will discuss her research and her new book at the Library of Congress at noon on August 9 …