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Posted by: Stephen Winick
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 …
Posted in: African American History, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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 …
Posted in: Caught My Eye
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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 …
Posted in: Pic of the Week
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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/ …
Posted in: Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Did you know that AFC has a trifold brochure, which we give out at events and in our reading room? We thought we’d share it on the blog in time for the National Book Festival. If you come on down to the festival, you can take a few of these away with you! You can stop …
Posted in: AFC Publications
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 …
Posted in: AFC History, African American History, African Americans, Folk Music, Folksong
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 …
Posted in: AFC Awards, AFC Events
Posted by: Stephen Winick
A little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act: Atlas Obscura, QI (Quite Interesting), Dangerous Women, Cracked, and Forbes, to name just a few, published versions of the …
Posted in: England, Folksong, Legends, Metafolklore (Folklore about Folklore)
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This blog post about the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg is part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. Billy Bragg will be here for a book talk, July 21 at 7:00 pm in the Mumford Room of the James Madison Memorial Building. …
Posted in: AFC History, AFC Publications, African American History, African Americans, Alan Lomax, Benjamin A. Botkin, Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series, England, Folk Music, Folksong, Hidden Folklorists, Jazz, Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), Popular Culture