{ subscribe_url:'//blogs.loc.gov/share/sites/library-of-congress-blogs/folklife.php' }

Archive for the AFC Events Category (113 posts)

Collection Connections: Hubby Jenkins Homegrown Concert, August 11

by
A man plays guitar and sings into a microphone. Text to the left of the photo says: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, Homegrown 2021, Online Concert Series, "Homegrown at Home."

Hubby Jenkins at the Carrboro Music Festival in 2018. Photo by Tom Barla. Shared to Flickr with a Creative Commons license.

I’m excited for this week’s Homegrown concert from Hubby Jenkins, who will be playing old-time songs and spirituals that are the root of American folk, country, blues, and gospel. The concert premieres at noon on August 11 on our Facebook page, which you can find at this link. After that, the concert will be available permanently at the concert page at this link, where you can also read more about Hubby.

So who is Hubby Jenkins? For now, I’ll just say that he’s an old-time and blues musician living in New York. He’s a singer and multi-instrumentalist who plays guitars, banjos, mandolins, and bones. He has been a member of the Rhiannon Giddens Band, and before that the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.  As a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, he played at the Library of Congress back in 2012, and I had the honor of doing a brief onstage interview with the band between sets.

Four people onstage playing music: a woman plays cello, a man plays banjo, a woman plays kazoo, a man plays bones.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops in the Coolidge Auditorium on February 18, 2012. L-r: Leyla MacCalla plays cello, Dom Flemons plays banjo, Rhiannon Giddens plays kazoo, and Hubby Jenkins plays bones. Photo by Abby Brack Lewis. 

Even before the 2012 concert, Hubby had visited us at the American Folklife Center to do research in our archive, so he’s an old friend of the Center with some deep knowledge of our collections. In the rest of this post, I’ll try to whet your appetites by talking about a few of the songs Hubby plays in the concert, and presenting related field recordings from our collections.

A man onstage plays banjo while sitting on a chair

Hubby Jenkins plays banjo with the Carolina Chocolate Drops in the Coolidge Auditorium on February 18, 2012. Photo by Abby Brack Lewis.

One of the songs Hubby puts his own stamp on in Wednesday’s concert is the ring shout “Moses Don’t Get Lost.” This classic song is mostly known from the repertoire of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, and there are several recordings of that very group doing the song in AFC’s Alan Lomax Collection. “Moses Don’t Get Lost” was usually led by the great singer John Davis, and the Alan Lomax collection contains three online versions of the song led by Davis, available at the following links:

Saint Simons, Georgia, October 12, 1959, Take 1.

Saint Simons, Georgia, October 12, 1959, Take 2.

Central Park, New York City (in concert), August 1, 1965.

On those three recordings, one of the supporting shouters was the great Bessie Jones, herself one of Lomax’s most important and impressive informants. Jones sang her own slightly different version for Lomax in his New York City apartment on October 6, 1961. Find Bessie Jones’s version at this link.

“Moses Don’t Get Lost” is also in the repertoire of the McIntosh County Shouters, another ring shout group from Georgia. The Shouters performed at the Library of Congress on December 2, 2010. You can find their version of the song, performed in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium, at this YouTube link.

Another song you’ll hear in Hubby’s concert is “I Am the Light of this World,” which was composed by the Reverend Gary Davis, an influential blues and gospel musician from South Carolina who lived in New York from the 1940s until his death in 1972. (Read more about Gary Davis at the Association for Cultural Equity.) We don’t have a recording of Davis singing this song online, but we do have a lot of Davis material in many collections, including some great photos in the John Cohen collection and online recordings in the Alan Lomax collection. For example, Davis played in the same Central Park concert as the Georgia Sea Island Singers in 1965, where Alan Lomax recorded him performing “Samson and Delilah,” “Soldier in the Army of the Lord,” “Sally Where You Get Your Liquor From,” and several more, as well as his commentary on salvation, on guitar playing, and on courtship! Hear all the Gary Davis selections from that concert at this link on the Lomax Archive site.

A man plays the guitar while smoking a pipe. Another mane watches him from behind.

Gary Davis and an admirer, photographed by John Cohen in 1954. Photo is copyright John Cohen, AFC John Cohen collection.

A third song Hubby will sing with a very direct connection to the American Folklife Center archive is “Finger Ring,” which Hubby learned from a cylinder recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon, the first head of our archive. Gordon collected the song in 1926, two years before the archive was founded, and brought the cylinder with him to become one of the first batch of sound recordings deposited in the archive. It was one of several songs sung for Gordon by a remarkable singer named Mary C. Mann. A respected leader in her community, and a deaconess in the Episcopal Church in Darien, Georgia, Mann ran a school that prepared young black women for work in domestic service. According to her family tradition, Mann was the great-great granddaughter of an enslaved woman from Madagascar, whose English name was Amelia. Family folklore said that Amelia was captured by the British in the War of 1812 and removed to the Bahamas, never to return to Georgia. But before this, she had children and grandchildren in Georgia from whom Mann was descended.

Eight children sit weaving baskets. A woman stands behind them.

Mary Mann stands with a group of her pupils who are apparently weaving traditional, coiled-grass baskets of the Sea Islands. Photo courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Nye. 

“Finger Ring” is a work song usually performed by crews of six to eight people while rowing a cypress dugout. Such “boat songs” were a well-known feature of coastal Georgia culture. Hear Mary C. Mann sing “Finger Ring” in the player below.

After the song, you can hear Mann say, “That was Miss Roberta Paul’s boat song, “Finger Ring,” I have sung just now. She likes that!  Sung by Mary C. Mann, Darien, Georgia, Macintosh county, April the twelfth, Nineteen twenty-six.” Mann was referring to the fact that “Finger Ring” was a favorite song of Robert Winslow Gordon’s wife, the former Miss Roberta Paul, whom Mann had known since childhood.

“Finger Ring” was not the only song Mann sang for Gordon’s cylinder machine that day. She also sang the spiritual “Ol’ Man Satan/Drive Ol’ Satan Away,” which has a unique history. Prior to her capture by the British, Mann’s ancestor Amelia taught this song to her granddaughter Violet; Violet in turn taught it to HER granddaughter, Mary C. Mann. Since this provenance placed the song among African Americans in the Sea Islands prior to the War of 1812, Gordon considered it “the earliest text of a Negro spiritual that has ever been published.” Hear Mann’s remarkable recording of this song in the player below.

These, of course, are just a few examples of the “collection connections” we could make between Hubby’s concert and our archive. I hope they’ve intrigued you, and especially hope you’ll tune into the concert, which premieres at noon, U.S. Eastern Time, on August 11, 2021. It will premiere on our facebook page, which you can find at this link. Once the premiere is ended, It will be permanently available at its own concert page, at this link. Please do come back and enjoy the concert!

 

 

“God put the good stuff where lazy people can’t have any”: Exploring West Virginia Foodways in a New AFC Film Series

by

The following is a guest post by West Virginia State Folklorist Emily Hilliard, who directs the West Virginia Folklife Program, based at the West Virginia Humanities Council. AFC staff have been working with Emily, as well as Mike Costello and Amy Dawson of Lost Creek Farm, to co-produce the Homegrown Foodways in West Virginia program, […]

August Online Symposium Will Feature Folklore Podcasters and Social Media Leaders

by

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!) 

Fieldwork During the Pandemic: Upcoming Online Lectures July 13 & 20

by

The American Folklife Center is happy to announce a two-part series of hour-long online Zoom presentations with live Q&A featuring recent and current Archie Green Fellows discussing the impact of the pandemic on their fieldwork experiences. We’re calling the event Occupational Folklife and Fieldwork in the Post-Pandemic World: Adaptation, Innovation, and the Future, Parts 1 & 2.  Registration is required, but don’t worry…you’ll find the registration links down near the bottom of this post!

Homegrown Plus: Emma Björling and Petrus Johansson

by

By now, experienced readers know the deal with these Homegrown Plus posts: we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. We’re continuing the series with the duo of Emma Björling and Petrus Johansson, who perform beautiful arrangements of Swedish and other Scandinavian folksongs. Emma Björling (vocals) is one of the foremost singers of Swedish folksongs performing today. She is a member of the bands Lyy and Skye Consort with Emma Björling, as well as vocal groups Kongero and Baravox. She has also toured extensively with the well-known Swedish folk band Ranarim. Petrus Johansson (guitar) started playing guitar and bass, mostly jazz and rock, when he was quite young. During his University studies he met Emma, and together they started playing Swedish traditional music. This led to a greater interest in the guitar as a folk music instrument, using it to provide bass lines. He is a trained guitar and bass teacher and has worked at Ingesund College of Music and several music schools. He also works as a freelance musician and has played with Mats Berglund, Svante Turesson and others.

Homegrown Plus: Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas

by

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.

Homegrown Plus: Eva Salina and Peter Stan

by

Eva Salina and Peter Stan have played not one but two Homegrown concerts in the last few years…so this blog presents three videos: both concerts and an oral history interview. California-grown, Brooklyn-based Eva Salina is a groundbreaking interpreter of Balkan Romani songs. Raised in the US Balkan Diaspora, Eva’s mentors are some of the greatest living Balkan musicians. Eva’s duo partner, Peter “Perica” Stan, is a Serbian/Romanian Roma accordionist known for his playful innovation and soulful, intuitive improvisations. Together, they played exciting Serbian and Roma music, and told fascinating stories about their lives and musical experiences. Find it all in the blog!

Citizen DJ and Collaborative Programming at American Folklife Center, Part 2

by

This guest post is the second in a series about collaborative programming the American Folklife Center supported last year that involved the Library’s Citizen DJ platform. The post comes to us from the staff at Class Act Detroit, a nonprofit organization based in Detroit, MI focused on providing equitable out-of-school programming that serves the metro […]