Hear about the tradition of mumming, or traveling your local area performing a brief play during the winter holidays. In this episode of the American Folklife Center’s podcast, Rheagan Martin of the Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled interviews Folklife Specialists Stephen Winick and Jennifer Cutting about the connections of the mumming tradition to the American Folklife Center. Mumming is a folk drama tradition in which groups of performers go house to house singing and performing a play. Jennifer describes the James Madison Carpenter Collection, which contains play scripts, recordings, photos, and drawings related to mumming. Stephen explains how the mumming tradition was brought the Library of Congress. Both talk about the connections of mumming to the solstice and to other wintertime traditions.
These days, it’s hard to make it through December in the U.S. without encountering Krampus. Hairy, scary, hoofed, and horned, the devilish character is wildly popular from coast to coast. Across the country, hundreds of events feature Krampus, including parades, “runs,” Christmas markets, and even mall photo-ops. Books, magazines, movies, and comics highlight his history and his adventures. But American Krampus is entirely a 21st century phenomenon. As recently as 2000, the Library of Congress had not a single book about Krampus in English. So just who is Krampus, and where does he come from? We’ll take a look at the medieval origins and modern development of Krampus in this blog.
The exciting old time duo The Creek Rocks, the recipients of the 2024 Artists in Resonance Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, bring old songs back to the Library in shiny new arrangements! Accomplished singer and banjo player Cindy Woolf and veteran guitarist and singer Mark Bilyeu established the group in 2015. Much of their work has been interpreting the traditional music of the Ozarks region. The Artists in Resonance Fellowship provided Cindy and Mark the opportunity to immerse themselves in the field recordings of folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell, who in December 1936 and January 1937 visited communities in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks. The Cowell recordings in the American Folklife Center’s archive serve as the source material for this concert, as well as The Creek Rocks' current album-length recording project. This blog presents the concert along with an interview in which we talk with them about their fellowship, their music, and their use of archival sources.
Here at "Folklife Today," we've been following the history of Jack tales, from their emergence in the late Middle Ages to their adoption into modern literature and media. In our last installment, we traced Jack in both fantasy literature and more realistic fiction. In this post, we'll look at Jack tales in other arts, from drama and film to sculpture and comics. We embed the Library of Congress restoration of the 1902 film “Jack and the Beanstalk” from the Thomas Edison corporation, as well as links to orally told folktales, film adaptations, and other media.
Welcome to the latest post in the Homegrown Plus series, featuring bluegrass quartet The Henhouse Prowlers. After two decades of touring and performing, the Henhouse Prowlers proudly look to the future, expressing their passion for music and humanity. Banjoist Ben Wright and upright bassist Jon Goldfine have been the heart of the band since its inception, while guitarist Chris Dollar and mandolinist Jake Howard (who joined 7 and 5 years ago respectively) bring fresh energy to the band's sound. The Prowlers approach music with a reverence for tradition coupled with willingness to explore beyond the ordinary. In their concert, they apply their trademark four-part harmonies to classic country and bluegrass, as well as modern Americana. In the interview we talk about their music, their history, and their activities with the U.S. State Department and their own nonprofit, Bluegrass Ambassadors, through which they have been able to take American music around the globe.
The American Folklife Center is excited to announce the launch of its new, easy-to-use Botkin Lecture Resource Guide, which gives users direct access to hundreds of hours of world-class lectures on folklore, folk music and traditional culture. Over the years, hundreds of prominent folklorists, ethnomusicologists, traditional artists, and scholars have accepted AFC’s invitation to present lectures in the Center’s Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture series. To date, more than 130 of their presentations have been shot on video for the AFC collections. Although most are available on the Library’s website and YouTube channel, they can be difficult to find unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. The new Botkin Lecture Guide, which you can visit straight from this blog post, makes finding, accessing and enjoying these talks easy.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with a classic from a few years ago with our good friend Dom Flemons, who performs and records as The American Songster. Back in 2020, Dom performed in the Homegrown at Home concert series, the pandemic-era version of Homegrown, in which artists submitted video concerts and we premiered them online. Dom Flemons, a Grammy award winner with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a four-time Grammy nominee, and a two-time Emmy nominee, was by no means a stranger to AFC. We first met him when he came in to do research in the Archive in 2007, which means that for almost 20 years he's been accessing and interpreting field recordings from our archive. Because of this, his repertoire includes many songs and tunes he learned from recordings of master musicians in the American Folklife Center archives. Appropriately, he was also the first artist featured in the Center's inaugural Archive Challenge in 2015. Dom approached the concert as an Archive Challenge opportunity, so all the songs have a connection to the AFC archive. As usual for this series, you’ll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore.
In 2020, singer-songwriter Crys Matthews participated in the American Folklife Center’s Library of Congress/Folk Alliance International Archive Challenge in New Orleans. The song she selected was “How I Long for Peace,” a song written by Peggy Seeger and sung by Seeger during her concert at the Library of Congress in 2007. Matthews adapted the song for the Archive Challenge, taking inspiration not only from Seeger, but from the spirituals and freedom songs she had heard in church growing up. The song was a highlight of the Archive Challenge that year, so much so that Matthews continued singing it. A few years later, she suggested a collaborative recording of the song to Rhiannon Giddens, a groundbreaking performer and another friend of AFC, who has received a Grammy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, among other accolades. Matthews and Giddens, along with the Resistance Revival Chorus, released their version in 2024. Mostly by coincidence, Peggy Seeger, who had never released an official recording of the song, revisited it in 2021. In this blog, we’ll present the story of this special archive challenge, with Crys Matthews’s Archive Challenge video embedded, and links to the Peggy Seeger version from 2007, the version with Rhiannon Giddens and the Resistance Revival Chorus, and Peggy Seeger’s 2021 interpretation.
We continue to explore the tradition of Jack tales, this time looking at the way they emerge into literature. In this post, we look at fantasy novels and short stories inspired by Jack, created by such authors as Leo Tolstoy, William Morris, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rachel Pollack, Charles de Lint, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Michael Buckley, Chris Colfer, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Gregory Mone, and Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi. We’ll also look at a few works of more realist fiction, including the Jack Aubrey novels by Patrick O’Brian and the Jack Reacher series created by Lee Child, uncovering the folktale underpinnings of a lot of classic and contemporary literature. We include links to orally told folktales, as well as author talks at the National Book Festival.
