Watch Natalie Merchant’s June 15 sing-along concert at the Library of Congress right here on the blog! The singer, songwriter, activist, and folklife advocate helped the Library mark the opening of the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery with a very special Family Day sing-along presentation. Around the sing-along and her evening concert, she spent a week in residence at the Library doing research, meeting with staff, and participating in the gallery opening and June Family Day activities. Natalie Merchant, who has remained one of America's most literate and literary pop stars since her days with the band 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s and 1990s, is also an enthusiast and advocate of traditional folk music and a member of the American Folklife Center's Board of Trustees. In this important leadership and advisory role, she spends time imagining new ways to help the Center further its mission--including this sing-along. Alongside a few of her own compositions, the sing-along featured mostly traditional folksongs which have connections to our unparalleled archival collections. In this blog, you can watch the sing-along itself and then explore these archival connections, including source recordings, photographs, links, and the stories behind the songs.
On September 8th, 1950, two women set out from Washington DC for the Appalachian Mountains on a hunt for folk songs. The veteran English folklorist Maud Karpeles, 65 years old and intent on revisiting some of the singers she had encountered with Cecil Sharp more than thirty years before, was accompanied by the American folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell, 18 years her junior, who had worked in many areas including the Appalachians. Their 27-day expedition in Cowell’s car, bearing an Eicor tape recorder loaned by the Library of Congress, took them from Virginia to North Carolina, and yielded 91 recordings, plus a number of photographs. In this series of blog posts we will be exploring their adventures along the trail, meeting some of the wonderful singers they encountered, and comparing the versions of the songs they recorded.
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of platinum-selling recording artist Natalie Merchant, musician and MacArthur Fellow Martha González, and community archiving scholar Ricardo L. Punzalan to the American Folklife Center Board of Trustees. We are also happy to report that legislative liaison Jean Dorton and theater professor John Patrick Rice have been reappointed to the board. Read more in this post at Folklife Today!
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying interviews, placing both videos together in an easy-to-find blog post. We're continuing the series with Sean Ardoin, an American Creole musician and singer. He is grandson of Louisiana Creole music patriarch Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin, son of Creole accordionist and bandleader Lawrence Black Ardoin, and older brother of hip-hop zydeco accordionist Chris Ardoin, with whom he co-led the Zydeco supergroup Double Clutchin'. The family traces its musical lineage to Bois Sec's older cousin and musical mentor, Amédé Ardoin, an early recording artist who is one of the most important figures in South Louisiana music. This blog has Sean's concert and interview embedded, plus a bonus concert of his group Creole United, and a link to his video "What Do You See."
The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce Traditional Folklore in a Digital World, a two-part symposium on August 17 and 24 examining some of the ways folklore is spread, discussed, and transformed in the digital environment. The symposium will bring together leading podcasters and influential figures in social media who are helping define what folklore is in the 21st century. It will consist of two Zoom-based panels, one on podcasts and the other on social media. Each panel brings together four compelling leaders in online folklore, who will present a brief rundown of what they do, and then take questions from the audience. AFC staff, including me, will be there to moderate and direct the questions. The podcast panel features the hosts of Lore, Crimelore, The Folklore Podcast, and Jack Dappa Blues and the African American Folklorist. The Social Media panel features folks from Folklore Thursday, Folk Horror Revival, and the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. We hope you'll join us for a fascinating discussion. Both panels are free and open to the public, but registration is required. (Don't worry, the links to register are in this post!)
We continue the Homegrown Plus series with the duo of Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, who perform their own unusual arrangements of traditional and original Scottish and American folk music on fiddle and cello. Alasdair Fraser has a concert and recording career spanning over 30 years, with a long list of awards, accolades, radio and television credits, and feature performances on top movie soundtracks, including Last of the Mohicans and Titanic. In 2011, he was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame. Natalie Haas, a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, is one of the most sought after cellists in traditional music today, and has performed and recorded with Mark O'Connor, Natalie MacMaster, Irish supergroups Solas and Altan, Liz Carroll, Dirk Powell, Brittany Haas, Darol Anger, Laura Cortese, and many more. Together, the duo of Fraser & Haas has helped reconstruct and revive a longstanding Scottish tradition of playing dance music on violin and cello. For their socially distanced concert, they performed some music solo and some using studio technology to join up separate performances, but most of it is never-before-released concert footage from their archive of pre-pandemic performances. In the interview, we discuss their separate musical histories as well as their 20-year career as a duo.
The American Folklife Center has recently received some coverage for our efforts to research and recognize African American history which we'd like to tell you about. Last weekend the Atlanta Journal Constitution published this article about the spiritual "Kumbaya." In the article, Shelia M. Poole interviews AFC staff members John Fenn and Stephen Winick (hey, that's me) and even call me "the folklorist version of Sherlock Holmes" for locating what we believe to be the first sound recording of "Kumbaya" some years ago. She also interviews Griffin Lotson, who did research here and in Georgia, and who helped get the song declared the first State Historical Song of Georgia. We wrote about that research here on the blog. We also did a podcast about it, at this link. And we've previously been covered and interviewed by the New York Times, which you can find here.
As we always do when Halloween rolls around, Folklife Today is gearing up for scary fun! We have a couple of spooky stories in store for you, as well as a surprise in late October. Our first scary tale is Jackie Torrence’s classic version of “The Golden Arm.” “The Golden Arm” is an old folktale …
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.