There’s a new holiday episode of the Folklife Today podcast in place! It’s unusual in that it’s an interview with me and our frequent guest Jennifer Cutting, but it was recorded for another purpose here at the Library of Congress. Our colleagues over at the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled have a Collections Connections audio supplement which is available to their constituents, and their host Rheagan Martin interviewed me and Jennifer for that service. It was a funny experience because we did the interview in the same studio around the same table where we have recorded the Folklife Today podcast since its inception, but this time I was the interviewee! This gives me one last opportunity to thank our colleague Mike Turpin who has kept that studio up and running for lo these many years—Mike retired from the Library of Congress last week. I’ll also mention that Jennifer, who is interviewed with me, retires in just two more weeks, on the same day as Thea Austen, whose retirement we mention in the interview, so it’s feeling a little lonely for this old-timer at the Library of Congress. But as I say in the podcast, before you break out the world’s smallest violin for me, listen to the episode, because we felt it might be fun to offer our own listeners some of that interview, along with a song we performed for Rheagan and Brandon Roe, the NLS audio engineer. They talked to us about mumming, a tradition of folk drama that’s near to our hearts at the American Folklife Center.
We’ve talked about mumming before on this podcast, but this is a more extensive discussion than we’ve had before here on Folklife Today. In brief, mumming is a folk drama tradition in which groups of performers go house to house singing and performing a play. In the interview, Jennifer describes the James Madison Carpenter Collection, which contains play scripts, recordings, photos, and drawings related to mumming. I explain how the mumming tradition was brought the Library of Congress. Both of us talk about the connections of mumming to the solstice and to other wintertime traditions.
After the link to the episode, I’ll add more links to Library of Congress resources on mumming and related topics. But first:
Download the episode here!
More About Mumming
In the interview, I wasn’t expecting Rheagan to ask for recommended reading about mumming! We gave some suggestions for holiday readings more generally, with Jennifer mentioning Susan Cooper’s “The Shortest Day” and me discussing J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Father Christmas Letters,” of which there are several editions with different titles! But I don’t feel we gave much advice about where to read up on mumming. So to make up for it, here’s a good set of readings on the mumming tradition.
First of all, visit this link for all our previous blogs about mumming.
Then, have a look at the following books and articles:
Abrahams, Roger D. “‘Pull out Your Purse and Pay’: A St George Mumming from the British West Indies.” This article describes a mummers’ play as performed in St. Kitts and Nevis. It gave us some of the lines we use in our own play!
Chambers, Sir Edmund Kerchever. “The English Folk Play.” This classic from the 1930s is often recommended as the first book to read for people new to mumming.
Glassie, Henry H. “All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming.” This rich ethnography of mumming looks at the practice more than the plays themselves, and tells us how mumming worked in a rural community in Ireland.
Halpert, Herbert & George M. Story. (eds) “Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland. Essays in Anthropology, Folklore and History.” We had occasion to mention Newfoundland mumming in our interview, and this set of essays is a good introduction to that tradition .
Hayward, Brian. Galoshins : the Scottish Folk Play. This book is a comprehensive introduction to mumming in Scotland.
Helm, Alex. “The English Mummers’ Play.” An introduction to the mummers’ play written by one of the most prolific collectors and publishers of plays. This was Alex Helm’s last statement on mumming, published posthumously.
Lyle, Emily B. “Galoshins Remembered: A Penny Was a Lot in These Days.” This book consists of an introductory essay and eight interviews with people remembering their time as mummers.
Thanks for listening and reading! If you need that link to the podcast again:, download the episode here!
We’ll see you next year with more episodes of “Folklife Today!”