Top of page
Posted by: John Fenn
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Kelly Revak. As I covered in a previous blog post, I have been exploring the “experimental recordings’ of Jesse Walter Fewkes and discovering a number of items of folkloric interest therein. One of these Fewkes recordings is at least somewhat well-known and that is this …
Posted in: Folk Music
Posted by: John Fenn
This is a guest post by AFC intern Adam Schutzman, who worked at the Center in the late summer. Over the course of my summer internship at the American Folklife Center, I had the pleasure of working on a large collection of 16mm films and videos found within the Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian Collection …
Posted in: Archival Practice
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 …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Folk Music
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 …
Posted in: AFC History, Hidden Folklorists
Posted by: John Fenn
Song of the Week: Barbara Allen Since my junior year in high school, when my dad handed me a copy of Tom Rush’s Blues, Songs, and Ballads (1964) the song “Barbara Allen” has held onto me. Little did I know back then that this is Child Ballad 84, that it is one of the most collected ballads …
Posted in: Charles Lafayette Todd and Robert Sonkin, Folk Music, Folksong