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Archive: April 2020 (12 Posts)

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

Homegrown Plus: Cedric Watson Trio

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 Cedric Watson, a four-time Grammy-nominated fiddler, singer, accordionist, and songwriter. Watson is one of the brightest contemporary talents to emerge in Cajun, Creole and …

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

Proverbs, Myths, and “The Bard”: Are We Really “Quoting Shakespeare”?

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The popular essay often known as "You Are Quoting Shakespeare," suggests that many common phrases have their origin in Shakespeare's works. This post shows that most of those phases were proverbial folklore, known well before Shakespeare's time. It suggests that attributing them to Shakespeare is a form of what Stephen Jay Gould called a "Creation Myth," and that the credit for many of the phrases should go to ordinary speakers of English. It argues that part of Shakespeare's greatness lay in his ability to use such phrases to create natural dialogue.

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

Bess Lomax Hawes Digital Collection Launches

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

This is a guest post by reference librarian Todd Harvey, who curates the Lomax family papers at the American Folklife Center. Today, the American Folklife Center announces the launch of the Bess Lomax Hawes (1921-2009) digital collection, now available at this link. A scholar, teacher, performer, writer, and filmmaker, Bess established and stewarded the Folk …

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

Words of Wisdom from the Descendant of a Survivor: ‘Stay Home and Play Your Banjo’

Posted by: Lisa Taylor

The following is a guest blog post by Hope O’Keeffe, an attorney in the Library’s Office of General Counsel, and an ardent supporter of the Veterans History Project. To read a previous guest post about her family’s history of proud military service, go here. This is my grandfather, John McLaughlin, quarantined during the 1918 flu …

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

Stories from the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic from Ethnographic Collections

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

The Library of Congress collections contain stories of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic as told by ordinary people, documented by folklorists, linguists, and others as they collected personal histories and folklore. Several of these are available online and a selection will be presented here, with links at the end under “Resources” where more can be found. …

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

No Depression Features Zora Neale Hurston

Posted by: Stephen Winick

We’re happy to announce a new venture in getting our stories out there! We’re working with No Depression, The Journal of Roots Music, which is published by the nonprofit Freshgrass Foundation.  They’ll be publishing a column called Roots in the Archive, featuring content from the American Folklife Center and Folklife Today, over at their website. …