Watch Natalie Merchant’s June 15 sing-along concert at the Library of Congress right here on the blog! The singer, songwriter, activist, and folklife advocate helped the Library mark the opening of the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery with a very special Family Day sing-along presentation. Around the sing-along and her evening concert, she spent a week in residence at the Library doing research, meeting with staff, and participating in the gallery opening and June Family Day activities. Natalie Merchant, who has remained one of America's most literate and literary pop stars since her days with the band 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s and 1990s, is also an enthusiast and advocate of traditional folk music and a member of the American Folklife Center's Board of Trustees. In this important leadership and advisory role, she spends time imagining new ways to help the Center further its mission--including this sing-along. Alongside a few of her own compositions, the sing-along featured mostly traditional folksongs which have connections to our unparalleled archival collections. In this blog, you can watch the sing-along itself and then explore these archival connections, including source recordings, photographs, links, and the stories behind the songs.
Watch Natalie Merchant’s June 13 concert at the Library of Congress right here on the blog! The singer, songwriter, activist, and folklife advocate helped the Library mark the opening of the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery with a very special "Live! at the Library" concert presentation. Around the concert, she spent a week in residence at the Library doing research, meeting with staff, and participating in our June Family Day activities. Merchant, who fronted the band 10,000 Maniacs during its most successful years and went on to a solo career of sustained depth and brilliance, is also a member of the American Folklife Center's Board of Trustees. Alongside a few of her own compositions, the concert featured mostly traditional folksongs which have connections to our unparalleled archival collections. In this blog, you can watch the concert itself and then explore these archival connections, including source recordings, photographs, links, and the stories behind the songs.
This post is an excerpt of an interview with 2024 American Folklife Center Community Collections Grant recipient Dr. Ashley Minner Jones on her project, Beyond Baltimore Street: Living Lumbee Legacies, as part of the Library of Congress Of the People: Widening the Path initiative.
Inspired by an annual re-watch of the alien invasion film "Independence Day," Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas takes readers on a journey through some of the UFO-related stories found in the American Folklife Center's archives.
The authors of two new books, Sheryl Kaskowitz (A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time) and Catherine Hiebert Kerst (California Gold: Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project), return this week to the Library of Congress to discuss the remarkable New Deal folksong collecting career of Sidney Robertson (later known as Sidney Robertson Cowell), whose recordings are held in the American Folklife Center. In her work recording songs for the federal government during the mid- to late-1930s, Robertson captured a diverse and multifaceted soundscape of the Great Depression. The conversation will be moderated by American Folklife Center's Director Nicole Saylor and will include a selection of the songs from the collections. The event, which is sponsored by The John W. Kluge Center and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, occurs Wednesday, June 26, 2024 at 4:00 pm EDT in room LJ 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building. In this post, we'll fill you in on the event, the authors, and the books.
The American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the 2024 recipients of its competitive annual fellowships and awards programs: the Archie Green Fellowship and the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award. This year, these awards went to six projects throughout the United States, whose proposals were reviewed and selected by internal and external panels at the American Folklife Center. Laurena Davis of Clifton, Colorado, received an Archie Green Fellowship for “Taking Stock: Ranching Women of Western Colorado.” Dr. Sarah Beth Nelson of Whitewater, Wisconsin, received Archie Green support for “Community Builders: Library Workers in Wisconsin.” Documentary filmmaker Sophie Dia Pegrum of Woodland Hills, California, received an Archie Green Fellowship for her project “Guardians of the Bees,” featuring interviews with beekeepers. Folklorist Kathryn Noval of Silver Spring, Maryland, received Archie Green funding for her research project “Professional Body Piercers in the 21st Century: Rooted in Passion.” Dr. Sophie Abramowitz, (Brooklyn, New York) received a Parsons Award to support onsite research in AFC collections for the expanded LP reissue of "Jailhouse Blues: Women’s a cappella songs from the Parchman Penitentiary, Library of Congress Field Recordings, 1936 and 1939." Finally, L. Renée, (Virgina), a poet and writer, received a Parsons Award to support her research on Black communities in coal mining and tobacco farming towns of Southwest Virginia and West Virginia.
Summer gardening season is in full bloom, and the American Folklife Center is searching through the gardens featured in multiple archived collections in search of the friendly pollinators - like bees, butterflies and birds - that brighten our lives, influence our foodways, and impact our cultural heritage.
On June 13th, a new exhibition titled, “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress,” opened to the public in the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery in the Thomas Jefferson Building. This post highlights items from the collections of the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project featured in the exhibition.
We're back with another entry in the Botkin Plus series AND another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! In this entry, we'll provide the video of a Botkin Lecture and a podcast interview, both of them featuring Cormac Ó hAodha. Cormac is the most recent Lovelace Fellow (aka Lomax Scholar) at the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center. That's a fellowship established within the Kluge Center especially for the study of the Alan Lomax collection, one of the American Folklife Center's signature collections. Cormac comes from the village of Cúil Aodha in the Múscraí Gaeltacht of Co. Cork in Ireland, a recognized heartland of the Irish language and traditional Irish-language singing. He is conducting in-depth research on the material Lomax collected some 73 years ago from singers in the Múscraí singing tradition, the same singing tradition Cormac grew up in and is a part of. Some of the people recorded by Lomax are Cormac's relatives, and his research seeks to illuminate their songs, their language, and their traditions. Follow the link to the post, the video, and the podcast!
