This blog post commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday draws on interviews recorded for the Civil Rights History Project collection, accompanied by selected images in the Glen Pearcy collection. The narratives offers viewpoints on the topic of non-violent direct action such as Dr. King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” tensions surrounding the formation of SNCC, and the reality of life on the front lines for activists confronted by violent segregationists .
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with a classic from a few years ago with our good friend Dom Flemons, who performs and records as The American Songster. Back in 2020, Dom performed in the Homegrown at Home concert series, the pandemic-era version of Homegrown, in which artists submitted video concerts and we premiered them online. Dom Flemons, a Grammy award winner with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a four-time Grammy nominee, and a two-time Emmy nominee, was by no means a stranger to AFC. We first met him when he came in to do research in the Archive in 2007, which means that for almost 20 years he's been accessing and interpreting field recordings from our archive. Because of this, his repertoire includes many songs and tunes he learned from recordings of master musicians in the American Folklife Center archives. Appropriately, he was also the first artist featured in the Center's inaugural Archive Challenge in 2015. Dom approached the concert as an Archive Challenge opportunity, so all the songs have a connection to the AFC archive. As usual for this series, you’ll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore.
This post presents several folktales from the Bahamas focusing on the adventures of the tricky, resourceful folktale hero Jack. We’ll see Jack escaping from the giants by charming them with his musical instrument and witness his courtship with the Devil’s daughter, Greenleaf. Like most Bahamian folktales, these stories contain complex wordplay and have songs embedded in the tales. The two tales here are very distinctively part of the Jack tale tradition, which must have been brought to the Bahamas with English settlers, but they also have African and other elements springing from their complex Caribbean roots. They were recorded by Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in 1935.
Welcome to our latest post in the Homegrown Plus series, featuring Louis Michot and Leyla McCalla, an outstanding duo performing traditional French-language music from Louisiana. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections. Louis Michot is a fiddle player and lead singer for the Grammy-award-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers. In addition to fiddle and vocals, Louis plays guitar, bass, ti-fer (triangle), and accordion--all the instruments of a typical Cajun band. Leyla McCalla was born in New York City to Haitian emigrants and activists. McCalla is a master of the cello, tenor banjo, and guitar, as well as a multilingual singer and songwriter. She is a founding member of Our Native Daughters and has appeared at the Library of Congress as a member of the Grammy-award-winning Black string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops. This event spotlights the New Orleans-based Nous Foundation and their Community Collections Grant project, "La Musique Nous Réunit: Documenting Louisiana French Music."
Guest author Sue Rubenstein DeMasi is an academic librarian, professor emeritus at Suffolk County Community College in New York and dramatic writer and journalist. Professor DeMasi is the author of several publications on Henry Alsberg, Director of the New Deal era’s Federal Writers’ Project from 1935-39. Her essay for Folklife Today on Henry Alsberg’s early career expands on her talk at the 2023 American Folklife Center symposium marking the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022). The anthology and symposium offered a range of scholarly perspectives and retrospective analysis of the FWP on its 80th anniversary (see this blog post about the symposium); symposium webcasts are accessible here: https://guides.loc.gov/2023-federal-writers-project-symposium. Professor DeMasi's post touches on Alsberg's pre-FWP activities as a writer, book editor and theatrical producer, all of which were concerned with advancing the struggle for social justice and human rights.
As we stand at the threshold of a new year, it’s a fitting time to reflect on the remarkable stories of those who came before us, especially the courageous women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, highlighted in Tyler Perry’s recent Netflix film, The Six Triple Eight. Just like the beginning of a new …
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.
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.
On April 10, 2024, Dr. Melissa Cooper (Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University-Newark) presented a fascinating lecture on Gullah Geechee cultural history at the Library of Congress, as part of the American Folklife Center's Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture Series. In this post, we highlight the video recording of Cooper's lecture and an oral history interview with Cooper, conducted by American Folklife Center staff members.
