The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2025 fellowships and awards. Archie Green Fellowships went to: Joel Chapman of Baltimore, Maryland, for “Cycling Lore: The Occupational Folklore of Bicycle Workers in America;” Georgia Ellie Dassler of Richmond, Virginia, for “Vets on the Trail: The Occupational Culture of American Sled Dog Veterinarians;” Amy Grossmann of the North Carolina Folklife Institute for “Professional Firefighters in Greensboro, North Carolina;” and Austin Richey of Hamtramck, Michigan, for “Backstage Detroit: Labor and Artistry at the Detroit Opera.” Their documentation will become part of AFC’s online Occupational Folklife Project. Gerald E. And Corinne L. Parsons Fund Awards went to: Lora Bottinelli of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to conduct onsite research with Library collections related to waterfowling; and Olivia Phillips of Bloomington, Indiana, to research the influences of African American musicians and musical styles on the influential North Carolina musician Frank Proffitt. Blanton Owen Fund Awards went to: Allison Cate of Nashville, Tennessee, for oral history interviews with founders and key organizers of the East Nashville Tomato Art Festival; and Justin Hunter of Fayetteville, Arkansas, for “She Heard Arkansas: An Ethnographic Biography of Mary Parler.” The Artists in Resonance Fellowship went to Amanda Pascali for a project focused on immigrant collections, including Italian and Sicilian-language folksong collections, at AFC. In the blog you’ll find more information on the awardees and their projects.
AFC Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas chats with Laura Grant, from the CCG project, "Returning to Our Roots: Traditional Nuwa Harvests." The post includes photographs from the project, interview excerpts, and a link to the full interview, in the third episode of a special subseries of the Folklife Today podcast.
The Creek Rocks, the first recipients of the American Folklife Center’s Artists in Resonance fellowship, will return to the Library of Congress on August 21 to perform in the Coolidge Auditorium. They’ll be playing their own arrangements of songs they gleaned from AFC’s deep Ozark Mountain collections as part of their fellowship research. In this post, we’ll introduce you to the band and link you to some fun resources, including music, interviews, and an Ozark mountain podcast. And, of course, we’ll provide the concert details!
The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce that 40 more Archive Challenge videos have gone online. In the Archive Challenge, the American Folklife Center helps accomplished musicians and groups select a song from the archive, put their own spin on it, and play it in a special showcase. This set of one-song videos thus features a diverse array of musicians interpreting materials from the American Folklife Center archive. The newly published set includes videos from the Folk Alliance International conferences in 2024 and 2025, along with a wayward set of 2020 videos that were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They include folk and blues performers from near and far—including the U.S., Canada, Scotland, France, Nigeria, Haiti, New Zealand, and Australia. Find a sampler of embedded videos, along with the field recordings that inspired them, in this blog post, along with links to each year's videos.
Un Homenaje: CCG Collection Pays Tribute to Houston's Chicano Music Pioneers
The AFC has launched the website, Sonidos De Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene, a fieldwork collecting project conducted through a Community Collections Grant. The blog describes the collections content, which features interviews of Houston's Chicano music pioneers conducted by community members, several of whom are musicians themselves . The blog includes audio clips and photographs and reactions to the collections and the website’s launch from an interview conducted with the Principal Investigator, Isaac Rodriguez.
The following is a guest blog post by Candace Milburn, liaison specialist with the Veterans History Project. Have you ever wondered what a Warrant Officer does in the military? When I hear the word “warrant,” my mind immediately goes to think about an arrest warrant or police searches. But during a recent documentary screening at …
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!
AFC Folklife Specialists Nancy Groce and Meg Nicholas chat with Neil Mellen and Modesta Yangmog, from the CCG project, "Warp and Weft of Yap's Outer Islands: Backstrap Weaving in Micronesia." The post includes photographs from the project, interview excerpts, and a link to the full interview, in the second episode of a special subseries of the Folklife Today podcast.
