Earlier today, the great gospel quartet The Fairfield Four graced the stage of the Coolidge Auditorium, and I was fortunate enough to take photos of them. I thought I’d share a few of them here as “pics of the week.” A Cappella singing groups are often hard to photograph, because they stand in a straight …
To the right, you’ll see a photo of the front door to AFC’s administrative office. If you missed the name plaque, it’s to the right of the door! As you can see, these official name plaques are a little small, especially for the grand doorways of the Thomas Jefferson Building. For that reason, AFC made a …
As part of the American Folklife Center’s celebration of the 2017 NEA National Heritage Fellowships, we featured a concert yesterday with awardee Eva Ybarra, a Texas conjunto bandleader known as the “Queen of the Accordion.” Her instrument is a beautiful three-row diatonic button accordion which she plays with great dexterity, making it sound almost chromatic. During the show I got …
In late July, the American Folklife center was privileged to host a book talk by Billy Bragg, who spoke about his book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. A new blog post over on the Library of Congress blog tells the story of how we came to get the well known English singer/ …