We’re back with another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! Events here at the AFC, including the retirement of our chief, Betsy Peterson, the hiring of a new archive director, Michael Pahn, and then the hiring of Nicki Saylor as our new chief, have kept us so busy that we haven’t released an episode in a while. In the meantime, world events marched on. The latest Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred just days before our most recent previous episode was released, and we’ve been thinking since then of our Ukrainian friends and colleagues. So we decided to do an episode of the Folklife Today podcast focusing on Ukrainian materials and traditions in the Archive. 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:
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Although I was around to help script the episode, the recording dates fell while I was on leave in Europe, so the episode was ably hosted by John Fenn and Michelle Stefano, and our colleague Thea Austen was their guest. They explored Ukrainian materials in the archive. Interview segments included a discussion of Ukrainian embroidery and dance, between Geraldine Johnson and Taissa Decyk; and an interview I did earlier this year with Julian Kytasty, about his family bandura band, who immigrated to the United States as refugees in the late 1940s. Michelle also discusses the Rylʹsʹkyĭ Institute Ukrainian cylinder collection, which documents musicians – and roughly 400 individual songs – from a wide range of places in Ukraine from 1908 through the 1930s. And, we present a song from Julian Kytasty and a set of dance music from Ukrainian band Gerdan.
As is often the case, much of the material in the podcast is discussed elsewhere on the blog, and other resources are available on the Library’s website. So for the complete audio of concerts and interviews of which we played clips, and detailed information on collections we talked about, see the links below.
You can find Julian Kytasty’s entire concert, plus my complete interview with Julian, at this link.
You can find the complete Gerdan concert, with an introduction by Solomia Gorokhivska, at this link.
You can visit the finding aid to the Rylʹsʹkyĭ Institute Ukrainian cylinder collection at this link.
And you can explore our Ukraine finding aid at this link.
As always, thanks for reading and thanks for listening!