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Posted by: Nicole Saylor
Recently, the American Folklife Center received a generous donation from the estate of Peter Bartis, a former AFC staff member, to support our internship program. In this post, we express our appreciation to the Bartis family and detail the excellent work of our former interns, who were supported by previous financial contributions.
Posted in: AFC History, ethnomusicologists, Internship program
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce the appointment of Jessica Looman, Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division (WHD), to the American Folklife Center Board of Trustees. President Biden appointed Looman for a term expiring June 1, 2030. Looman had previously served as the Principal Deputy Administrator of WHD since Wednesday, January 20, 2021. WHD enforces worker protections and provides outreach and education about federal labor laws including minimum wage, overtime, child labor, and family and medical leave.
Posted in: AFC History, Archie Green
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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.
Posted in: AFC History, African American History, Alan Lomax, Caught My Eye, Folksong, John Lomax
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce the selection of three summer interns who will work on public programs, outreach activities and descriptive access work. One intern comes to us from the Utah State University folklore studies program, and two are supported by the AFC Internship Fund. Hanna Salmon is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how Palestinian storytellers foster affective atmospheres through their performances. Maggie Jones has just graduated magna cum laude from First Nations University of Canada’s Indigenous Languages Program with a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics. They have an interest in Algonquian languages, Indigenous oral history, language revitalization, and journalism. Melanie Kimball is earning an MA in folklore studies at Utah State University. Her research interests include supernatural legends, folk beliefs, vernacular religion, and ethnomusicology. Her thesis investigates how people use music as an apotropaic and folk remedy for fear. Since 2017, the AFC Internship Fund has supported 12 paid internships. It was started by a generous donation from the late Peter Bartis, a former staff member. As the American Folklife Center approaches its 50th anniversary in 2026, we are committed to building this fund to help train a new generation of cultural workers.
Posted in: AFC History, Internship program
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
In this post, Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, reviews the AFC's 2023 accomplishments.
Posted in: AFC Events, AFC History