Top of page
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is a guest blog post by Carl Fleischhauer. It presents a version of the talk he gave at our Alan Jabbour tribute event earlier this year. It has been edited for presentation in this blog. These remarks are about Alan Jabbour as founding director of the American Folklife Center: his thinking, activities at the …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Episode three of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! Our latest podcast presents some of our favorite Christmas songs. In this blog post, I’ll present the full versions of all the songs. …
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Happy Blogiversary! As our longtime readers may recall, the first post on Folklife Today was posted five years ago today for Halloween 2013. That means we’ve been around for five whole years! All of us at Folklife Today would like to thank all the readers out there who have read our posts over the years. We’d also …
Posted in: Halloween
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Langston Hughes is mostly remembered selectively as a “folk” and jazz poet, or author of black vernacular blues and jazz poetry. While Hughes did dedicate himself to creating and reinterpreting these genres throughout his life and career, the core of his work is actually in collecting and experimenting with folklore across spaces and media. In Harlem and abroad, Hughes operated as what scholar Daphne Lamothe calls a “native ethnographer,” adapting his work during and beyond the Harlem Renaissance across genres to the discourses of anthropology, folklore, and sociology in a mode reminiscent of that of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, civil rights activist, songwriter, and author of the local history book Black Manhattan James Weldon Johnson, choreographer Katharine Dunham, and many others. Specifically, Hughes was an ethnographer of black vernacular culture, transcribing different kinds of linguistic and musical performance and reinterpreting those transcriptions in and as his own texts.
Posted in: African American History, Hidden Folklorists
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following was written by Hannah Rose Baker, a musician from Boston, MA, who recently completed an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. In 1938, in Beaver Island, Michigan, Andrew Gallagher, known locally as “Andy Mary Ellen,” sang a song called “Sentenced to Death” for Alan Lomax, who was collecting folk music …
Posted in: Caught My Eye, Celtic Music, Folksong, Irish American History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In my last post at Folklife Today, I wrote about a folksong that connected my appearances on some important radio shows. Since then, some of my Library of Congress colleagues (some current and some retired) have expressed interest in the song, stemming from their own experiences as radio listeners. Given their interest, I thought I’d …
Posted in: Cowboy and Western Music, Folksong, Old Time Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Here at the American Folklife Center, we’ve always had an appreciation for radio. As the home of an archive with a lot of fantastic audio recordings, the “folk archive” has been ripe for use on the radio since its earliest days. John and Alan Lomax, heads of the archive back in the 1930s and 1940s, …
Posted in: Radio, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Way back when Folklife Today celebrated our 100th post, I highlighted one of Alan Lomax’s collecting triumphs, the disc numbered AFS 100. For this, our 500th post, I thought I’d do a similar story about AFS 500. This disc was also recorded by Alan Lomax, during a field trip to the Bahamas in 1935 which …
Posted in: African American History, Folk Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This article about the broadcaster, journalist, and writer Alistair Cooke is part of a series called "Hidden Folklorists," which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. It mainly details his work on the 12-part 1938 BBC radio series "I Hear America Singing," which was the first time Library of Congress field recordings were used on the radio. It also discusses Cooke's involvement in the Library's recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, and presents the first recordings of his voice, made for the purposes of a dialect study in 1934.
Posted in: Hidden Folklorists, Radio