In the last entry in our series on the Green Man, we look at this figure from folklore as people encounter it in the modern world, including its appearances in art, music, performance, and spiritual practice. We especially look at enactments of the Green Man as they occur in the folk revival, renaissance faires, and faerie festivals. Following other scholars, we suggest that the Green Man in modern contexts often suggests creative resistance to environmental destruction, the modern, and the mundane. The post includes many photos of Green Man enactments and artworks.
Happy holidays from the American Folklife Center! Watch a video of the AFC Mummers performing our 2023 mummers play! Then you can read the play, see the pictures, and even read the annotations if you’re interested in the history of holiday customs. This year’s play is called “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity: A Literary Ball Mumming.” When Artificial Intelligence tries to make writers obsolete, can St. George Eliot, Sherlock Holmes and Enola Holmes save the day? Find out in this play set at the North Pole Library Literary Ball, which includes wassailing carols and dancing to traditional tunes as well!
Mummers plays are short plays which were traditionally performed in Britain, Ireland, colonial America and the West Indies at holiday time. Mummers went from house to house and pub to pub, collecting food, drink and small change as a reward for their entertainment. The American Folklife Center’s archive boasts a large collections of British mummers play texts in its James Madison Carpenter Collection.
On September 8th, 1950, two women set out from Washington DC for the Appalachian Mountains on a hunt for folk songs. The veteran English folklorist Maud Karpeles, 65 years old and intent on revisiting some of the singers she had encountered with Cecil Sharp more than thirty years before, was accompanied by the American folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell, 18 years her junior, who had worked in many areas including the Appalachians. Their 27-day expedition in Cowell’s car, bearing an Eicor tape recorder loaned by the Library of Congress, took them from Virginia to North Carolina, and yielded 91 recordings, plus a number of photographs. In this series of blog posts we will be exploring their adventures along the trail, meeting some of the wonderful singers they encountered, and comparing the versions of the songs they recorded. This is the second post in the series.
On September 8th, 1950, two women set out from Washington DC for the Appalachian Mountains on a hunt for folk songs. The veteran English folklorist Maud Karpeles, 65 years old and intent on revisiting some of the singers she had encountered with Cecil Sharp more than thirty years before, was accompanied by the American folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell, 18 years her junior, who had worked in many areas including the Appalachians. Their 27-day expedition in Cowell’s car, bearing an Eicor tape recorder loaned by the Library of Congress, took them from Virginia to North Carolina, and yielded 91 recordings, plus a number of photographs. In this series of blog posts we will be exploring their adventures along the trail, meeting some of the wonderful singers they encountered, and comparing the versions of the songs they recorded.
This post summarizes the second roundtable presentations of the distinguished panelists of the American Folklife Center's Community-driven Archives discussion event, which was held in September 2023 and is now available online.
In this guest blog, Dr. John Edgar Tidwell, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Kansas, focuses on the critical importance of Sterling A. Brown's work as Editor on Negro Affairs for the Depression-era Federal Writers' Project, and his efforts in the struggle against racial inequality by "authentic[ating] representations of Blacks in the American Guide Series travel guides." The response to his work by authorities speaks volumes about the repressive political climate that sought to suppress any research and analysis of societal conflict and injustice such as Brown's. Dr. Tidwell presented a version of these remarks at an AFC symposium in June 2023 to mark the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022), which critically examines the FWP on its 80th anniversary. It is most appropriate to publish this blog today, since it was 45 years ago today, on November 16, 1978, that the Library of Congress celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Archive of Folk Song with a day-long symposium featuring, among others, Alan Lomax, song-collector and archivist for the Archive in its early years; David "Honeyboy" Edwards, master blues singer and later a Grammy recipient; and Sterling A. Brown, author, poet, and guiding figure in the FWP.
This Folklife Today post is written by Dr. Sarah Fouts, UMBC, who shares the first film in the American Folklife Center Homegrown Foodways Film Series, available for viewing in this post and on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.
This is an entry in our occasional series on the Green Man, a figure from traditional folk culture. Among the traditional meanings shared by the figures of the Foliate Head and the Wild Man or Green Man seems to have been that humanity, like vegetation, must follow and adapt to the changing seasons. This traditional meaning could well have given rise to a connection between the Green Man and calendar customs, which goes back to some of the earliest appearances of the figure. In this post we’ll look more closely at the Green Man as an element of seasonal celebration.
A guest blog post by Professor Sarah Fouts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, on this year’s AFC Homegrown Foodways Film Series: Baltimore and New Orleans, which features two films premiering on the Folklife Today blog: El Camino del Pan a Baltimore on Tuesday November 7th @ noon ET; and El Camino del Mole a New Orleans on Tuesday November 14th @ noon ET.