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Archive: August 2019 (8 Posts)

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

Hidden Folklorists Charles Finger and Nicholas Ray on the Folklife Today Podcast

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Episode Eleven 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! In this episode, John Fenn and I discuss two more hidden folklorists, writer Charles J. Finger and filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Charles J. Finger collected folklore …

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

Homegrown Plus: Harmonia

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 Harmonia, a band from Cleveland, Ohio, which presents both rural and urban folk music of Eastern Europe, ranging from the Danube to the …

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

A Possum Crisp and Brown: The Opossum and American Foodways

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This is the third in a series of posts about folklife related to the Virginia Opossum, the only marsupial native to the United States.  Find the series here! In 1910, Maggie Pogue Johnson, an African American woman from Virginia, published a dialect poem about classic African American cuisine, or what we would today call “soul food.” …

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

Homegrown Plus: Ara Dinkjian & Zulal Concert and Oral History

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

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 a concert and oral history with Ara Dinkjian and the Zulal trio. In May 2015 Ara Dinkjian, a master of the oud, …

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

“Display Day” Brings Veterans to the Table

Posted by: Megan Harris

The following is a guest post by 2019 Junior Fellows Kim Windham and Patricia Glaser, who worked with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. As a community-driven archive where all veterans’ histories are valued, the Veterans History Project (VHP) has collected more than 110,000 veterans’ narratives of their time in service.  All of these collections …

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

Awesome Possum!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This is the first of a series of blog posts celebrating Didelphis virginiana, commonly known as the North American opossum. (Find the whole series here!) This cat-sized nocturnal animal is the only new world marsupial that lives north of Mexico, and therefore the only marsupial native to the United States. In most American dialects of …