When William Main Doerflinger interviewed the retired sailor and shanty singer Patrick Tayluer in April, 1942, one of the topics he asked Tayluer about was shipwrecks. This is not surprising: ever since people took to the seas in ships, maritime folks have been fascinated and terrified by shipwrecks; shipwreck stories go back to the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. As it turned out, Tayluer had several stories about shipwrecks, which he told as first-person narratives, but which might not have happened exactly as he described. We’ll look at two of those stories in this post, exploring Tayluer's fascinating blend of fact and fiction.
In an attempt to inspire herself and others to finish handmade gifts for the holidays, Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas takes readers on a quick tour of hand-crafted items documented in the Center’s field survey collections.
Happy Holidays from the American Folklife Center! As in years past, we enlivened Library life last week with performances of a traditional Mummers play, updated for modern times. The title of this year’s play is "Keeping Cool and Dry for the Holidays: A Film Preservation Mumming," and it’s all about Film Preservation and the National Film Registry. It takes place at the Northpole Audio Visual Preservation Pavilion (NAVPP). St. George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life) is confronted by Connor MacLeod (Highlander series), who has a dastardly plan to get his terrible movies on the registry by undermining the preservation of all other films. The play includes Film Preservation Board members like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, some of our usual characters, and some surprises, including a reenactment of the “Let’s all go to the Lobby” song—which is actually on the real registry. Mummers’ plays are short 15-minute plays, traditionally performed in Britain, Ireland, North America, and the West Indies at holiday time, as the 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 one of the largest collections of English Mummers’ Play texts in the world, in its James Madison Carpenter collection. In this blog post you'll find the text of the play and lots of fun photos--plus a wealth of links to explore!
Most people know that Friday the 13th is considered an unlucky day. I had some fun researching the roots of this belief back in September, when the Library of Congress received a call from NPR requesting to interview me about Friday the 13th. Not surprisingly, I found facts and speculation, as well as intriguing new evidence. I also encountered what I often call metafolklore: folk stories about folk beliefs. In this post, we’ll look into what I found. From the Norse gods to the Knights Templar, from mathematics to religion, and from French plays to American horror movies, let's look at everyone's favorite day for bad luck.
The digital records collection of the AIDS Memorial Quilt--the largest folk arts project in history commemorating those lost to HIV/AIDS--was published on the Library of Congress' website on December 1 (World AIDS Day 2024). This milestone marks over ten years of collaboration between the American Folklife Center, the National AIDS Memorial (NAM), and the NAMES Project Foundation to preserve and steward the AIDS Memorial Quilt Records Collection. In this post, Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center, recounts the history of this collaboration and the years of work that led to the online publication.
Allow us to introduce Ozarks musicians Mark Bilyeu and Cindy Woolf (The Creek Rocks). The duo are our very first Artists in Resonance, and are here for a week of in-depth research. Mark and Cindy, who live in Springfield, Missouri, were chosen from among 22 applicants to the Center’s Artists in Resonance Fellowship. The fellowship is intended to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the Center’s archives. During their fellowship, Cindy and Mark are focusing on the materials Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded in Missouri in 1936 and 1937 for the Resettlement Administration. According to the duo, the items in the collection from Springfield, despite probably being the earliest audio documents of folk music in and around that city, "seem to be virtually unknown to our local historical memory, save for but a very few figures immersed in the study of the Ozarks and its folklore." Their goal is to produce a full-length album of songs from the collection in new arrangements by The Creek Rocks. In this post you can read more about The Creek Rocks, find links to their work and to the other archival collections they’ve visited, and find out how to apply for future fellowships.
