This post looks at the history and meaning of the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty." It considers several popular origin stories for the rhyme, including that it is about Richard III of England, or about a siege engine in the English Civil War. It points out that these stories constitute "metafolklore," or folklore about folklore, and traces their history. It also considers how the rhyme works as a riddle, whose solution is "an egg." It includes many unusual versions of "Humpty Dumpty," many fun stories, and many classic illustrations!
This post is an announcement of the 2024 American Folklife Center Community Collections Grants recipients, whose work will become collections in the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with a thrilling concert by Charly Lowry, a dynamic singer-songwriter from Pembroke, North Carolina. An Indigenous woman belonging to the Lumbee and Tuscarora Tribes, she considers her work a platform for raising awareness around issues that plague underdeveloped and underserved Native communities. As usual for this series, you'll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore.
In the Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus series, we present selected lectures in our Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lectures series that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. In this post, we'll present a classic lecture from 2018: Joseph J. Palackal and his presentation Syriac Chants & Aramaic Christianity in India. As usual for posts in this series, you'll find a lecture video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with one that slipped through the cracks: a thrilling 2020 video concert by Sihasin, the sibling duo of Jeneda and Clayson Benally. The Benallys are award winning musicians from the Diné Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona. The name Sihasin is a Diné word that means hope and assurance, and the music reflects hope for equality, for healthy and respectful communities, and for social and environmental justice. Sihasin combines harmony vocals with bass and drums, in a style rooted in Native, rock, punk and world music. As usual for this series, you'll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. But there's also a bonus this time: Sihasin participated in our 2023 Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International in Kansas City, so we have embedded that exciting video as well. And if that weren't enough, the concert features a real, live horse!
Welcome to Homegrown Plus, Classic Edition! Until 2018, we weren't recording most of our Homegrown interviews on video and we hadn't yet thought of Homegrown Plus. But there are some concert videos from that era that deserve the Homegrown Plus treatment of placing concert videos together with an interview or other related video in an easy-to-find blog post. In this case, we'll feature a classic concert from 2015 featuring the Sones de México Ensemble, along with a lecture on corridos by band member and ethnomusicologist Juan Díes, and a video of the inaugural reading of Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, in which Herrera and Díes performed a corrido composed according to principles outlined in Díes's lecture.