In this post we look at the life and legacy of Joe Hickerson, longtime employee and head of the Archive of Folk Culture, who passed away on August 17, 2025. Joe was well known as a folklorist, archivist, ethnomusicologist, and folksinger. He was an important public face for folklore and folk music, and his passing will be seen as the end of an era among folk music enthusiasts, as well as for those of us at the American Folklife Center.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC) turns 50 today, January 2, 2026. To mark the occasion, AFC will sponsor public programs, special events, and other activities throughout the coming year, celebrating the Center’s role in the preservation and promotion of traditional culture. Events will include special editions of our Homegrown Concert series and Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture series; special symposia, including one dedicated to our COVID-19 Oral History Project; and a major exhibition of treasures from the Center’s collections, to launch in mid-September. The American Folklife Center dates back to January 2, 1976, when President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-201, The American Folklife Preservation Act. The Act created the Center and placed it here at the Library of Congress with a mandate to “preserve, support, revitalize, and disseminate” American folklife.
In or about 1942, Alan Lomax sketched out a draft or proposal for a children's picture book, "The Story of the Mighty Blue Goose." The book, which Lomax planned to have fully illustrated by an artist, was to be based on "The Grey Goose," a song he had recorded for the archive alongside his father in 1934. Lomax credited the singer as the book’s main author: “Iron Head” Baker, a Texas prison inmate and trusty who sang about 60 songs for the Lomaxes. In 1936, Baker was paroled and spent three months collecting songs across the South with John A. Lomax, returning to prison in 1937. Like many of Alan Lomax’s projects, the book appears to have been interrupted by World War II and his departure from the Library of Congress. This is a shame, because Lomax was clearly onto something. "The Story of the Mighty Blue Goose" would have been inspirational on several levels. An homage to African American culture credited to a Black man and his white assistants, it would have been an inspiring children's book and a significant accomplishment in the legacies of the Lomaxes and of Iron Head Baker.
On Wednesday, July 5, and Friday, July 7, 2023, the American Folklife Center (AFC) welcomed a delegation of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American musicians to the Library of Congress. The musicians—Shchuka-Ryba, Bozhychi, Mariya Kvitka, Yaroslav Dzhus, Katya Chilly, and Ukrainian Village Voices—traveled to Washington, D.C. to perform at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Joining the groups were representatives from the Maidan Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, and Dr. James Deutsch—a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Find out about their visit, and about many of AFC's Ukrainian collections and programs, in this blog post!
If you've visited the American Folklife Center's main page on the Library of Congress website in the last few days, you may have noticed a change. The pages have been converted to the Library of Congress's new standard format for Research Centers across the Library's divisions. Our legacy URL of loc.gov/folklife will now redirect you to the new landing page. We're excited to share the new site with you, so this blog will guide you to some of its features and provide the link for you to explore.
This blog post details a visit by members of the the Swedish Women's Education Association of DC (SWEA DC) to the Library of Congress. Curators from the European Reading Room, the Manuscript Division, and the American Folklife Center presented treasures related to Swedish and Swedish American history, literature and folklore. In the post you can read more about these treasures, and follow links to view many of them for yourself.
It's hard to believe, but this is the 1000th published post here at Folklife Today! To celebrate, we'll talk about one of the songs on the Archive's 1000th disc. It reveals a lot about the history of the archive, the methods of Alan Lomax, and the development of a well known cowboy song. It also introduces us to "Daca," a little-known folksinger active from the 1920s through the 1940s, whom we'll profile in a later post. This track is known as AFS 1000 B2, and is Alan Lomax, then Assistant-in-Charge of the archive, singing "Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle." In the blog you can hear the song, read about where Lomax learned it, find out about its roots in "The Virginian" by novelist Owen Wister, and examine the influence of Lomax's version on the song as it was later sung by cowboys.
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!
The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce that Nicole "Nicki" Saylor has been appointed the fourth Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, effective May 22, 2022. Followers of the American Folklife Center will remember Nicki as the head, and then director, of the Archive of Folk Culture, which is AFC's archive, from 2012 to 2021. "The Center's work of preserving and presenting stories, songs and living traditions from all over the world is more important than ever," Nicki says. "The staff is so innovative and committed to the work. It's a dream job and I am excited!"
