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Three people dance wearing Ghanaian garb

Homegrown Plus Premiere: Wuza Wuza Music and Dance Ensemble from Ghana

Posted by: John Fenn

This week our Homegrown Plus Premiere series continues with Wuza Wuza, a music and dance performance company featuring Ghanaian artists deeply invested in the expression of African traditions and cultures. Following the standard for this series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Nepal traditional dance comes to the American Folklife Center

Posted by: John Fenn

In this guest post one of our archivists, Valda Morris, discusses the work she’s been doing behind the scenes to process an important collection and help create a finding aid that will assist researchers in discovering the richness of the materials.  The American Folklife Center is proud to announce the availability of an online finding …

Woman stands on stage of auditorium speaking to crowd with a hand held microphone.

Staff Spotlight: Melanie Zeck On Collaborating with National Philharmonic

Posted by: John Fenn

This guest post is by Melanie Zeck, one of our Reference Specialists at the American Folklife Center. As the stage door opened, blindingly bright lights struck my eyes.  I strode over to the piano, sensing that the audience was following my every move.  At that moment, I   realized that no one—not even the orchestra members …

Woman playing a banjo onstage

Caught My Ear: The Pineconers Live at Albert Hall, 1983!

Posted by: John Fenn

Every so often I dive into our online collections in search of interesting fieldwork materials to share, especially anything from the large-scale field surveys that the Center facilitated from the late 1970s on through the mid- 1990s (visit an interactive Story Map about these projects). Just the other day I visited the Pinelands Folklife Project collection, used the faceted search options to pull together all audio files also tagged as “songs” and started listening. One particular 32-minute field recording caught my ear, so I’ve shared it in full in this blog.

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Citizen DJ and Collaborative Programming at American Folklife Center, Part 1

Posted by: John Fenn

This guest post is the first in a series about collaborative programming the American Folklife Center has recently supported involving the Library’s Citizen DJ platform. The post comes to us from Solidarity Studios, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago, IL but working worldwide to connect youth with music making skills, empowering narratives, and each other. …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Update: Lomax transcription review challenge

Posted by: John Fenn

At the start of this month we announced a “challenge” for the Lomax crowdsourcing campaign on the Library’s By the People platform. To refresh your memory, the campaign is focused on transcribing about 9000 pages of handwritten and typed Alan Lomax manuscripts. The ultimate goal is to create machine-readable electronic text versions of Lomax’s materials so …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Homegrown Plus: Contemporary traditional music from Zimbabwe with Mokoomba

Posted by: John Fenn

In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with Mokoomba, a six-piece band that hails from Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Band members Mathias Muzaza, Trustworth Samende, Abundance Mutori, Donald Moyo, Ndaba Coster …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Intern reflection: Brittney Meadors

Posted by: John Fenn

This is a guest blog post from Spring 2019 intern Brittney Meadors working at the American Folklife Center. Brittney is a first year graduate student at Howard University pursuing a Masters degree in Classical Voice and certification in International Affairs. Her internship was initiated by Dr. Carla Hayden (Librarian of Congress) and Dr. Wayne A. …