Un Homenaje: CCG Collection Pays Tribute to Houston's Chicano Music Pioneers
The AFC has launched the website, Sonidos De Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene, a fieldwork collecting project conducted through a Community Collections Grant. The blog describes the collections content, which features interviews of Houston's Chicano music pioneers conducted by community members, several of whom are musicians themselves . The blog includes audio clips and photographs and reactions to the collections and the website’s launch from an interview conducted with the Principal Investigator, Isaac Rodriguez.
The American Folklife Center proudly announces the availability of an online collection of documentary field research created through the Community Collections Grants (CCG) program. Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala is an initiative of the research team of Mark Boots Keahi aʻamau pio ʻole i ka poli o Pele Lupenui (project director, interviewer, and musician), Adam Palya (videographer), and Cheryl Lupenui (project manager). Their year-long efforts have resulted in this unique collection of video recordings, song sheets, and photographs that document generations-old “heirloom songs” of the Kohala region in the northwest portion of the island of Hawai’i.
Guest author Sue Rubenstein DeMasi is an academic librarian, professor emeritus at Suffolk County Community College in New York and dramatic writer and journalist. Professor DeMasi is the author of several publications on Henry Alsberg, Director of the New Deal era’s Federal Writers’ Project from 1935-39. Her essay for Folklife Today on Henry Alsberg’s early career expands on her talk at the 2023 American Folklife Center symposium marking the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022). The anthology and symposium offered a range of scholarly perspectives and retrospective analysis of the FWP on its 80th anniversary (see this blog post about the symposium); symposium webcasts are accessible here: https://guides.loc.gov/2023-federal-writers-project-symposium. Professor DeMasi's post touches on Alsberg's pre-FWP activities as a writer, book editor and theatrical producer, all of which were concerned with advancing the struggle for social justice and human rights.
