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Archive: 2020 (119 Posts)

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

Readers in Higher Education: Please Take AFC’s Survey!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Calling all college and university educators: we want to help you, and need to know what you need! Please take our survey here! To be more precise about our survey, it is aimed at professors, instructors, librarians, and practitioners who are teaching classes in folklore, ethnomusicology, American studies, area studies, and allied fields. We want …

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

Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Happy Thanksgiving! In this post, we’ll take a look at a set of interesting photos from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. They depict a custom most people nowadays don’t know much about: Thanksgiving masking. Thanksgiving maskers, like trick-or-treaters on contemporary Halloween, used to go door to door, begging for handouts. They also …

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

Songs of the Harvest

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

Thanksgiving days were declared by United States Presidents at various times in American history, beginning with George Washington making November  26, 1789, a day of thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving was not established as a regular yearly Federal holiday until 1870. So there are not a great many songs specifically for American Thanksgiving, and these were composed …

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

Harvey Pratt: Dreaming of a National Native American Veterans Memorial

Posted by: Kerry Ward

The following is a guest blog post by liaison specialist Owen Rogers about the November 11, 2020 completion and programing surrounding the National Native American Veterans Memorial.  American Indians and Alaska Natives comprise less than 1% of the United States population. They boast a higher percentage of veterans than any other ethnicity and a tradition of …

Portrait of Bessie Jones

Halloween Songs and Stories on the Folklife Today Podcast AND in No Depression!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Time is getting short before Halloween, so we’re combining two announcements in this one blog post! First of all, as our readers may remember, we’ve been working with No Depression, The Journal of Roots Music, which is published by the nonprofit Freshgrass Foundation. They’re publishing a column called Roots in the Archive, featuring content from the …

Postcard showing a creature made of harvest fruits, a devil, a witch, and a black cat walking in single file holding jack o'lanterns on the end of sticks.

Devil Songs for Halloween

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In his book The Folk Songs of North America, in an introduction to one of the American Folklife Center's finest songs about the Devil, Alan Lomax wrote: Early America saw the Devil as a real and living personage. Rocks in New England were scarred by his hoofprints, as he carried off maidens, screaming and howling, over the hills, or came after the men who had sold their souls to him in return for money or success. […] A mountain woman tells of the last moments of her mean old husband…’I knowed he war goin’, because all the dogs from fur and nigh come around and howled. Hit wur a dark night. But plain as day, comin’ down yon side the mountain, through the bresh so thickety a butcher knife couldn’t cut hit, I seen the Devil a-comin’. He war ridin’ a coal-black cart, drivin’ a coal-black oxen. The cart come down to the door and stopped. When it come, it come empty. But when it went away, hit had a big black ball in it that war Arzy’s soul. […] Lomax's passage serves as a fine and atmospheric introduction to our own Halloween exploration of the Devil in folksongs from the American Folklife Center archive!