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Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: This is just a teaser for a fuller post over at the Library of Congress Blog. Read the full story there! 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: …
Posted in: AFC Awards, AFC History, Alan Lomax
Posted by: Lisa Taylor
Periodically, the Veterans History Project (VHP) sets aside a day for Library of Congress employees to preserve the stories of the veterans in their lives on-site, using VHP’s recording equipment. Whenever we announce the opportunity to participate in this way, our colleagues enthusiastically respond and quickly make appointments to bring in their spouses, parents, siblings …
Posted in: African Americans, Narratives, Oral History, Storytelling, Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This recollection is in memory of the Center’s founding director, Alan Jabbour, who died on January 13, 2017, and whose career and contributions are described in this blog post. Today’s text and photographs are by Carl Fleischhauer, a retired American Folklife Center staff member and a colleague of Alan’s for 46 years. Alan Jabbour and …
Posted in: AFC History, Alan Jabbour, Appalachia, Folk Music, Folklorists, Folksong, Legends, Oral History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: This is a guest post by John Fenn. John is the new head of the Research and Programs section of the American Folklife Center. My first weeks here at the American Folklife Center have been a whirlwind of meetings, trainings, and orientations to all aspects of the Library of Congress. As I’ve wandered through …
Posted in: AFC History, Alan Jabbour, ethnomusicologists, Fieldwork, Folklorists, Norwegian Americans, Thomas Jefferson Building
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