Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light, a trio from the Boston area playing bluegrass and old time music, are the latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series, in which we include a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. You'll find it all in this post...along with a bonus song video! Singer, multi-instrumentalist, and Lennon Award-winning songwriter Rachel Sumner is a fixture of the Boston roots and Americana scene. She fronts the trio Traveling Light on vocals, guitar and banjo, with Kat Wallace on fiddle and Mike Siegel on upright bass. Together they specialize in applying their deeply rooted bluegrass know-how to new interpretations of traditional folk songs and tightly crafted original songs written by Sumner. The band has previously participated in our Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International and contributed a song to our special Labor Day presentation in 2003. In this concert they made a special effort to play some songs that are part of the American Folklife Center archive, making this another entry in the Archive Challenge as well.
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.
Watch Natalie Merchant’s June 13 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 "Live! at the Library" concert presentation. Around the concert, she spent a week in residence at the Library doing research, meeting with staff, and participating in our June Family Day activities. Merchant, who fronted the band 10,000 Maniacs during its most successful years and went on to a solo career of sustained depth and brilliance, is also a member of the American Folklife Center's Board of Trustees. Alongside a few of her own compositions, the concert featured mostly traditional folksongs which have connections to our unparalleled archival collections. In this blog, you can watch the concert itself and then explore these archival connections, including source recordings, photographs, links, and the stories behind the songs.
If you love to dance, jump, sing and clap, the June 15 Family Day at the Library of Congress is for you! The Treasures Family Festival “Treasures of American Communities” is a free, drop-in program that will run from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The event will showcase both the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery, highlighting gems from the Library’s vast collection, and the treasures of human creativity and cultural expression. The American Folklife Center (AFC) is thrilled to be a part of these festivities, which kick off with a sing-along lead by our wonderful Board of Trustees member, Natalie Merchant. Natalie is not only an amazing musician but also an evangelist for getting children to learn and love traditional songs and games. The festival is included with the daily timed-entry tickets required to visit the building, but portions of the event require preregistration. Find the links and more information in this blog post!
The passing of harmonica virtuoso and blues master Phil Wiggins on May 7, 2024, was a sad event for the music world, and particularly for the American Folklife Center. Phil was one of the most celebrated musicians in the blues nationwide, and one of the most important roots musicians of any kind in the Washington area. For those reasons among others, AFC has featured Phil in concerts probably more often than any other musician during the last few decades. In this post, we'll bring together most of Phil's appearances that were shot on video, show you some never-before-seen photos of Phil, and pay tribute to a longtime friend of the Center.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with an entertaining and educational concert and interview by Reverend Robert B. Jones, Sr., an inspirational musician and storyteller celebrating the history, humor, and power of American roots music. His deep love for traditional African American and American music is shared in live performances that interweave timeless stories with original and traditional songs. For more than thirty years Robert has entertained and educated audiences of all ages in schools, colleges, libraries, union halls, prisons, churches and civil rights organizations. He brought that inspiration here to the Library of Congress on February 15, 2024, as part of the Homegrown series as well as the series "Live! At the Library," and as part of our celebrations of Black History Month. As an ordained minister and a Baptist pastor, Rev. Jones has an unwavering faith the cultural importance of sacred and traditional American roots music. At the heart of his message is the belief that our cultural diversity is a story that we should celebrate, not just tolerate. This concert included blues, spirituals, gospel, rock, and even a touch of hip hop, delivered with voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica. Watch for the special sequence in which Rev. Jones is joined by his wife Sister Bernice Jones, his daughter Arnecia Jones, his son Robert Jones II (aka R.J.), and his daughter-in-law, R.J.'s wife, Sister Rosa Warner Jones. As usual for this series, you’ll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with one that slipped through the cracks: a thrilling 2020 video concert by Sihasin, the sibling duo of Jeneda and Clayson Benally. The Benallys are award winning musicians from the Diné Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona. The name Sihasin is a Diné word that means hope and assurance, and the music reflects hope for equality, for healthy and respectful communities, and for social and environmental justice. Sihasin combines harmony vocals with bass and drums, in a style rooted in Native, rock, punk and world music. As usual for this series, you'll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. But there's also a bonus this time: Sihasin participated in our 2023 Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International in Kansas City, so we have embedded that exciting video as well. And if that weren't enough, the concert features a real, live horse!
Welcome back to Homegrown Plus! We're continuing the series with a concert and interview featuring Grammy Award winning American Roots artists Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer together with accomplished Chinese classical hammered dulcimer player Chao Tian. The trio's repertoire includes traditional Chinese and Appalachian music as well as contemporary and traditional music from around the world. They use instruments that include yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer), gourd banjo, five-string banjo, ukulele, guitars, dumbek, cello-banjo and mandolin, employing them in unusual combinations to create exciting new arrangements of old music. Cathy and Marcy join Chao in singing Chinese songs, and Chao easily adds her love of American Old-Time music to fiddle tunes and songs. As usual with Homegrown Plus blogs, you'll find the concert video, an interview video, and a wealth of links to related collections and concerts, all right here in this blog post.
In April 2023, the American Folklife Center hosted a Homegrown concert here at the Library of Congress featuring Spælimenninir, a Scandinavian folk music ensemble based in the Faroe Islands. Spælimenninir likes to say their music is as familiar as an old time barn dance and as exotic as the landscape of the Faroe Islands, the band’s home in the North Atlantic. Spælimenninir’s repertoire is music of the Nordic countries drawing on traditions centuries old and compositions new as today. The current line-up of Spælimenninir includes one native Faroese, three Danes, and two Americans, who sing and play many instruments, including fiddle, recorder, piano, guitar, mandolin, nyckelharpa, and acoustic bass. The multinational background of the members and combination of instruments make the music unique; no other band in the world sounds like Spælimenninir. The sound reflects each member’s heritage and illustrates the links between the music traditions of the Scandinavian countries and the United States, and we were very pleased to feature them in the Homegrown concert series. Like other blogs in the Homegrown Plus series, this one includes a concert video and a video interview with some of the performers, plus links and connections to Library of Congress collections.
