The American Folklife Center is excited to announce the online availability of an excellent fieldwork collection of interviews and videos of cultural events created through its Community Collection Grants (CCG)! “Lao Buddhist New Year Festival in Southern Louisiana,” documents the Louisiana Lao New Year Festival presented in 2022 by Wat Thammarattanaram, a Buddhist temple and monastery in Broussard (Iberia Parish), Louisiana. A community-based research team conducted interviews and captured video of events, ceremonies, and celebrations. Find links to the collection in this blog post.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress today launched its seventh season of “America Works,” an original podcast series that honors the creativity, resilience, and dedication of the 168-million-strong American workforce. The new season focuses on workers whose jobs involve animals – from sustainable farmers to a fishing shop owner to a taxidermist as well as a port sampler who measures fish and a trash hauler who uses draft horses. The eight-episode series, part of the American Folklife Center’s ongoing Occupational Folklife Project, introduces audiences to a wide range of voices from the contemporary American workforce. Each episode, excerpted from a longer full-length oral history interview, runs approximately five minutes. The first episode is available now on Apple Podcasts and at loc.gov/podcasts. Subsequent episodes will be released each Thursday through June 5th. This blog post provides an overview of the season and a preview of upcoming episodes.
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.
An overview of "Jack tales" in the collections of the American Folklife Center. The phrase refers to a loose cycle of adventure stories featuring a young hero, most often named Jack, who makes his way in the world with cleverness and wit. This post introduces the genre and presents five tales told by four tellers: Samuel Harmon, Maud Long, Nora Hicks, and Ray Hicks, who all come from the same extended family.
The latest items to catch my ear in the Archive of Folk Culture are two reels of recordings of Eunice Yeatts McAlexander, a ballad singer who was recorded in 1978 as part of AFC's Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project. McAlexander, who passed away in 1990, had many wonderful versions of traditional ballads brought over to Appalachia from Britain, and she's a great source for unusual ballad texts. In addition to traditional ballads like “The Two Sisters,” “Little Massie Grove,” and “Lord Bateman,” she also sang nursery rhymes and lullabies for the collector, Wally Macnow. This blog post provides a little background on the singer and her songs, and embeds the digitized reels, photos, and detailed tape logs so you can listen and follow along.
In this post, we hear one last farewell shanty from the retired sailor Patrick Tayluer, who sang and told stories for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1942. The song tells the romantic tale of a sailor weighing anchor to leave for the port city of Rio Grande, Brazil. He says goodbye to his sweetheart and asks her to marry him when he returns. This is the final post in a series about the sea shanty singer Patrick Tayluer, and contains links to the entire series where you can find more songs and stories of the sea.
