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 From the Mountains to the Sea: The Folksong Collecting Work of Anne and Frank Warner, an unusual presentation in our series. From the Mountains …
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 Gabriel Muñoz and Melodias Borinqueñas, an ensemble from New Jersey performing Puerto Rican folk music. The group is led by Gabriel Muñoz, a …
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 the The Fairfield Four, an African-American gospel quartet that has existed for more than 95 years. Best known for its performance in the …
This past weekend, AFC held the last of its planned Summer Jams, with a Blues Jam led by the great Phil Wiggins and co-sponsored by the Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation. We plan to hold more of the jams in the near future, repeating some of the genres we’ve already featured (old-time, Irish, ballads, and …
This week, we had a very special guest at AFC: folksinger, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon. John brought us a masterful performance of traditional music, much of it gleaned from fieldwork he donated years ago to the AFC archive. He also graciously sat for an oral history interview. Both were recorded and will become webcasts, …
This summer, the American Folklife Center is hosting a series of informal jams to celebrate our living folk traditions, and to bring to life the collections from our vast ethnographic archive. The idea grew out of the jam we held to honor our founding director, Alan Jabbour (see a video here), and the series started …
Back in December 2017, a colleague of ours here at the Library published a short piece in the Music Educator’s Journal highlighting the many video recordings of musical performances at the Library of Congress hosted on the Library’s YouTube channel. Focusing on videos documenting the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown concert series, Lee Ann Potter (Director, …
The following is a guest post from AFC Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce. A previous Folklife Today blog, “Botkin Lectures to Go!,” drew readers’ attention to an engaging and readily accessible AFC resource: the more than 100 AFC Botkin Lectures on a wide variety of folklore and folklife topics that are currently available free-of-charge through the …
