Recently, the American Folklife Center published a new collection from the Occupational Folklife Project, which features 16 interviews with religious workers in Kentucky and Indiana. In this post, Senior Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce interviews folklorist Taylor Dooley Burden, who created the collection with support from an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center.
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.
This blog highlights a new episode of the Folklife Today podcast, which explores an important collection of Gullah Geechee sound recordings in the archives of the American Folklife Center. The collection features over four hours of Gullah Geechee people singing sacred music, preaching to congregations, and giving testimonies in 1955 and 1956. Courtney Siceloff, then-director of Penn Community Services, recorded this collection at community centers and churches across St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Dr. Eric Crawford, Interim Chair of the Music Department at Claflin University and the author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (University of South Carolina Press), joins this episode to contextualize these recordings and to inform listeners about the people who made them.
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.
The disc labeled AFS 1250 features the great Haitian singer Francilia and the Sosyete Dereyal, a religious congregation of Vodou practitioners with whom she sang. Francilia was one of the most prolific singers Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded on their 1936-37 trip to Haiti. In all, they recorded 96 songs sung by Francilia, including solo songs and songs with the Sosyete. These ranged from religious songs to secular love songs. In this, our 1250th blog post at Folklife Today, we present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home. It’s the first of two posts about Francilia; in the second we’ll cover her influence on Haitian music today.
We continue our exploration of Jack tales with a look at printed collections of stories. The prominence of Richard Chase’s 1943 book “The Jack Tales” has tended to obscure other valuable collections, both before and after his publication. We’ll look at works from a wide variety of authors: collectors from oral tradition, including Isabel Gordon Carter, Vance Randolph, Leonard Roberts, and Herbert Halpert; storytellers, including Donald Davis, Jackie Torrence, and Duncan Williamson; and folklorists and anthologists such as Joseph Jacobs, Carl Lindahl, William Bernard McCarthy, and Anita Best. There's also embedded audio of Maud Long and Duncan Williamson, and links to other audio versions of Jack tales you can enjoy!
In 2023, the American Folklife Center awarded folklorist Selina Morales with an Archie Green Fellowship to interview traditional healers living and working in Puerto Rico. Morales, in collaboration with filmmaker Alexis Garcia, used the fellowship to create a new Occupational Folklife Project collection, titled “Healing Work in Puerto Rico.” In this post, Morales and Garcia discuss their collection with Dr. Nancy Groce (Senior Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center).
Join us as we continue to explore Jack tales! Jack tales are adventure stories in which Jack is faced with various forms of adversity, and uses his wits and luck to win the day. Some of these stories feature magical elements such as silver swords and flying ships, but in others Jack uses only his brains, his hands, and his meager possessions. From the earliest Jack tale, a slightly bawdy medieval story, to the famous "Jack and the Beanstalk," and beyond to other tales, we'll look at old world and new world elements of the stories. Audio of three stories is embedded, with links to many more audio and text versions of traditional Jack tales.
