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Archive: 2018 (120 Posts)

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

350 Under Their Belts: Arkansas Couple Marks Milestone

Posted by: Lisa Taylor

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 …

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

Songs of Great Lakes Ships and Shipping

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 …

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

This Just In: Spanish “Folklife and Fieldwork!”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

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 …

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

Engaging Collections: AFC Chicago Ethnic Arts Collection Gathering

Posted by: Michelle Stefano

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 …

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.