We’ve had some scheduling challenges which led to an unexpected hiatus, but we’re back with another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! Since springtime keeps threatening to bust through the cold weather, we’re featuring songs of spring. Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on Stitcher, iTunes, or your usual podcatcher. As usual, I’ll present links to relevant blog posts, videos, and audio selections in this post. But first:
Get your podcast here!
For this episode, we were joined by AFC’s public events coordinator, Theadocia Austen. In fact, as revealed recently by the New York Times, Thea is an international woman of mystery, and we are lucky she had time to talk with us at all!
Most of the songs in the episode are presented in their entirety, so where possible here on the blog I’ll present a link to the individual song with all the available metadata, along with photos of some of the performers. Here we go!
The first song was a great old ballad of star-crossed love called “Early in the Spring,” sung by canal boat captain Pearl R. Nye, who is pictured at the top of this blog. You can find the song at this link. Pearl Nye’s whole collection is also online and you can find that at this link.
Our second song was “When Spring Comes On,” sung by Bob and Jim Copper of the Copper Family. The song, a pastoral harmony song they described as a “spring glee,” was recorded in England in 1951 by Alan Lomax, and can be found at this link courtesy of our colleagues at the Association for Cultural Equity.
The third selection was “Fleurs, Certaines Jolies Fleurs,” recorded in Haiti by Alan Lomax in March 1937. For now, that one must remain exclusive to the podcast! It was sung by Baptiste Pierre. Technically, the podcast only features half of the recording, but Pierre sang the whole song twice, so the podcast features the entire song. You can read more about the Haiti collection here.
Next, we presented “Nightingales of Spring” as sung by Warde Ford in California in 1938. As we say in the podcast, it’s kind of a crazy story in which a man has been away at war, and on seeing his girlfriend waiting for him, he decides to fool her by pretending to be someone else. More than this, he tells her that her sweetheart is dead but wanted her to marry him instead! When she rejects him, he reveals his true identity. Rather than clobbering him, she agrees to marry him. This is a common situation for such ballads, but hard to imagine in real life! You can find the song with all its metadata at this link.
To round off the show, we presented the “Springtime Polka” from the Spring 1977 meeting of the Chicago Zither Club. From all the documentation, this was quite an elaborate gala complete with a concert, dinner, and dance featuring folk dancers from the Donauschwaben Club, pictured above. The meeting was documented as part of AFC’s Chicago Ethnic Arts collection. You can find all the documentation at this link; the polka is toward the end of Part 2 of the sound recording.
That brings us up to speed on the full audio behind the podcast. As always, thanks for reading and thanks for listening!