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Archive: 2018 (43 Posts)

Four men sing into microphones

Homegrown Plus: The Fairfield Four

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with the The Fairfield Four, an African-American gospel quartet that has existed for more than 95 years. Best known for its performance in the …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Pics of the Week: Blues Jam with Phil Wiggins!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This past weekend, AFC held the last of its planned Summer Jams, with a Blues Jam led by the great Phil Wiggins and co-sponsored by the Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation.  We plan to hold more of the jams in the near future, repeating some of the genres we’ve already featured (old-time, Irish, ballads, and …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Langston Hughes: Experimental Folklorist

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.

Caught My Ear: “Sentenced to Death” by Andrew Gallagher

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 …

John McCutcheon plays banjo in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, for the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Concert Series. September 12, 2018. Photo by Stephen Winick

Pics of the Week: John McCutcheon!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This week, we had a very special guest at AFC: folksinger, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon.  John brought us a masterful performance of traditional music, much of it gleaned from fieldwork he donated years ago to the AFC archive. He also graciously sat for an oral history interview. Both were recorded and will become webcasts, …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

“Mustache on a Cabbage Head”: Three Centuries’ Experience with “Our Goodman”

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 …

King Biscuit Time memorabilia on the walls of the Delta Cultural Center.

Folklife On the Air: A Tribute to Two “Radio Guys”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Here at the American Folklife Center, we’ve always had an appreciation for radio. As the home of an archive with a lot of fantastic audio recordings, the “folk archive” has been ripe for use on the radio since its earliest days. John and Alan Lomax, heads of the archive back in the 1930s and 1940s, …