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Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is a guest blog post by Carl Fleischhauer. It presents a version of the talk he gave at our Alan Jabbour tribute event earlier this year. It has been edited for presentation in this blog. These remarks are about Alan Jabbour as founding director of the American Folklife Center: his thinking, activities at the …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Episode three of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! Our latest podcast presents some of our favorite Christmas songs. In this blog post, I’ll present the full versions of all the songs. …
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
November 11, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the formal end of World War I. It seems appropriate to say something about what this new day meant and came to mean. Also, I want to provide some highlights of Folklife Today blogs that marked the 100th anniversary of World War I. These were a part …
Posted in: World War I
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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 …
Posted in: Halloween
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
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 …
Posted in: Folksong
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Langston Hughes is mostly remembered selectively as a “folk” and jazz poet, or author of black vernacular blues and jazz poetry. While Hughes did dedicate himself to creating and reinterpreting these genres throughout his life and career, the core of his work is actually in collecting and experimenting with folklore across spaces and media. In Harlem and abroad, Hughes operated as what scholar Daphne Lamothe calls a “native ethnographer,” adapting his work during and beyond the Harlem Renaissance across genres to the discourses of anthropology, folklore, and sociology in a mode reminiscent of that of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, civil rights activist, songwriter, and author of the local history book Black Manhattan James Weldon Johnson, choreographer Katharine Dunham, and many others. Specifically, Hughes was an ethnographer of black vernacular culture, transcribing different kinds of linguistic and musical performance and reinterpreting those transcriptions in and as his own texts.
Posted in: African American History, Hidden Folklorists
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following was written by Hannah Rose Baker, a musician from Boston, MA, who recently completed an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. In 1938, in Beaver Island, Michigan, Andrew Gallagher, known locally as “Andy Mary Ellen,” sang a song called “Sentenced to Death” for Alan Lomax, who was collecting folk music …
Posted in: Caught My Eye, Celtic Music, Folksong, Irish American History
Posted by: John Fenn
This guest post is by Sarah Elizabeth Tomlinson, a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At their school’s annual Christmas performance, forty kindergarten and first-grade students in Durham, North Carolina bounced and sang along with the Library of Congress. Specifically, they performed for an audience of family and …
Posted in: Folk Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In my last post at Folklife Today, I wrote about a folksong that connected my appearances on some important radio shows. Since then, some of my Library of Congress colleagues (some current and some retired) have expressed interest in the song, stemming from their own experiences as radio listeners. Given their interest, I thought I’d …
Posted in: Cowboy and Western Music, Folksong, Old Time Music