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.
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.
The artist known by the single name “Francilia,” whom we featured in a recent post, 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, who was known in the local community as a rèn chante (queen of song). Her repertoire ranged from religious songs to secular love songs, and she performed solo and with groups. Following the repatriation of Lomax’s collection to Haiti, Haitian musicians were able to hear Francilia, and in 2019 the group Lakou Mizik recorded one of her songs in an Archive Challenge showcase sponsored by AFC. In this post, we continue to present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home, along with the Archive Challenge video of Lakou Mizik.
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!
The American Folklife Center is excited to announce that we’re bringing our Archive Challenge model to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, both on the National Mall and streaming live on YouTube! Our good friends and colleagues across the Mall have cooked up a great festival on the theme of “Youth and the Future of Culture.” As part of the festivities, we’ve engaged 8 groups of young musicians to learn pieces from the Archive of Folk Culture and play them on the festival’s main stage. Youth Archive Challenge sets will occur on July 2, 4, 5, and 7 and will feature Irish American tunes, Hungarian folk dance, Anglo American traditional ballads, American old-time music, Persian Classical music, multiethnic street songs, Bulgarian folk music, and Caribbean steel pan—with a special appearance by frequent Festival and Homegrown artist Christylez Bacon. Find links to the schedule and the streams, as well as information on the performers, in this post!
We continue our exploration of Jack tales with a fascinating story recorded in the Bahamas in 1935: "Jack Rescues the Princess from the Tiger." The story was told to Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle by Alexander Finderson and a group of his neighbors in Andros Island. The tale involves a princess who is abducted by a tiger and forced to marry him, until Jack comes along to rescue her. In addition to presenting audio and a transcription of the tale, we'll look at some of this story's connections to other folktales. Interestingly, it seems to have roots in a story that is widespread in India, but also has connections to Bre'r Rabbit tales from South Carolina. The post also presents striking photos of a man we believe might be the storyteller.
The latest post in the Homegrown Plus series features Ensemble Sangineto, one of the most popular groups on the Italian folk scene. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections. The ensemble Sangineto is comprised of three talented singers and instrumentalists. Adriano and Caterina Sangineto are twins -- Adriano plays Celtic harp and Caterina plays bowed psaltery. Jacopo Ventura rounds out the trio on guitar. The group sings in three-part harmony, with Caterina's clear voice taking the lead. The Sanginetos are children of a world-renowned luthier who has spent years crafting instruments for some of the leading folk and early music performers, so their childhood was spent meeting and listening to such musicians as Derek Bell of the Chieftains and Alan Stivell, a foundational artist of the Breton music revival. Ventura is a conservatory trained classical guitarist who has branched out to play many of the stringed instruments common in European and Asian folk music. Their concert takes you on a trip through Italy via a traditional song from each region, with medieval, Celtic, jazz, and contemporary stylings among others, thrown in for good measure.
In the interview, we learn about their lives and the world of Italian folk music.
