Happy Blogiversary! As our longtime readers may recall, the first post on Folklife Today was posted five years ago today for Halloween 2013. That means we’ve been around for five whole years! All of us at Folklife Today would like to thank all the readers out there who have read our posts over the years. We’d also …
The Folklife Today Halloween Podcast is Live As we hope you’ve come to expect, we have something very special in store this Halloween. As I mentioned in our last post, we’re launching the Folklife Today Podcast on October 29, and hey…that’s today! The first episode is called “Haunting Tunes for Halloween.” It’s hosted by John …
The following is a blog post about Veterans History Project (VHP)’s 18th birthday. Do you remember your 18th birthday? Birthdays, especially milestone birthdays,are often a time of celebration paired with reflection. You consider how far you have come, and yet dream of the next chapters. As the Veterans History Project (VHP) turns 18 we find ourselves …
Halloween Is Approaching Fast! As you know, we love to feature special content for Halloween, including scary songs, spooky stories, and fabulous photos. This year, we’re continuing our lead-up to the holiday with the classic folktale “Mr. Fox,” told by Connie Regan-Blake. Hear it in the player at the bottom of this post. But first, …
As we always do when Halloween rolls around, Folklife Today is gearing up for scary fun! We have a couple of spooky stories in store for you, as well as a surprise in late October. Our first scary tale is Jackie Torrence’s classic version of “The Golden Arm.” “The Golden Arm” is an old folktale …
The following is a guest blog post by Anita Deason, who serves as the military veteran liaison in the office of Sen. John Boozman (AR). One of Deason’s duties is to teach volunteers how to participate with the Veterans History Project (VHP). To date, she and her team have trained more than 500 Arkansans. I …
In 1938 Alan Lomax embarked on his first solo recording trip, available on the Library of Congress website as Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings. Among these recordings are songs of the local history of ships and shipping on the Great Lakes. One of my mother’s brothers and his family lived on the …
The American Folklife center is pleased to announce the Spanish-language version of the 4th edition of Folklife and Fieldwork! A team of us here at AFC and beyond have been working hard to make our field manual even more useful by translating it into some of the world’s most widely spoken languages. We passed a …
With 31 digitized AFC collections now online at loc.gov, AFC staff has long been thinking of ways to promote and enhance meaningful uses of them. In the past couple of years, these discussions have focused on the digitized, ethnographic survey collections, such as the Montana Folklife Survey, South Central Georgia Folklife Project, Rhode Island Folklife …