The latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series features Celtic duo Rakish. As usual, it includes a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. Rakish is made up of violinist Maura Shawn Scanlin and guitarist Conor Hearn. Maura and Conor draw on the music they grew up with and perform it in a way that reflects their shared interest in and love for chamber music as well as improvised music. Maura Shawn, a two-time U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion, and a winner of the Glenfiddich Fiddle Competition, has the technical range of a classical violinist and the sensitivity of a traditional musician. Conor, a native to the Irish music communities of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, makes his home in Boston playing guitar for several traditional music acts and bands. Using musical form and harmonic language as focal points, Rakish demonstrate the influence and overlap between dance music and airs from Britain and Ireland and art music or classical music from surrounding countries. The concert included musical dance forms and tune types including jigs, reels, hornpipes, and airs, arranged from written collections to be performed on the fiddle and guitar. In the interview, we talked about how Rakish prepared for this concert. using musical transcriptions from The American Folklife Center and the Library’s Music Division, including late baroque and early galant music. Watch the concert and interview right in this blog post!
We're back with another entry in the Botkin Plus series AND another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! In this entry, we'll provide the video of a Botkin Lecture and a podcast interview, both of them featuring Cormac Ó hAodha. Cormac is the most recent Lovelace Fellow (aka Lomax Scholar) at the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center. That's a fellowship established within the Kluge Center especially for the study of the Alan Lomax collection, one of the American Folklife Center's signature collections. Cormac comes from the village of Cúil Aodha in the Múscraí Gaeltacht of Co. Cork in Ireland, a recognized heartland of the Irish language and traditional Irish-language singing. He is conducting in-depth research on the material Lomax collected some 73 years ago from singers in the Múscraí singing tradition, the same singing tradition Cormac grew up in and is a part of. Some of the people recorded by Lomax are Cormac's relatives, and his research seeks to illuminate their songs, their language, and their traditions. Follow the link to the post, the video, and the podcast!
Welcome back to Homegrown Plus! We're continuing the series with Martin Carthy, one of the best known and most critically acclaimed musicians performing traditional songs in England. Like other blogs in the Homegrown Plus series, this one includes a concert video and a video interview with the featured performer, plus links and connections to Library of Congress collections. Martin Carthy has been a leading figure in the revival of English folk music since the 1960s. He has been a member of many iconic formations, including the duo of Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, the a cappella harmony group The Watersons, the pioneering electric folk-rock groups Steeleye Span and the Albion Band, the groundbreaking folk and brass combo Brass Monkey, and the acoustic folk groups Waterson: Carthy and Wood Wilson Carthy. He is also one of the most influential solo artists in folk music, with a guitar style emulated by practically all English folk guitarists since the 1970s. His versions of many traditional folksongs have become standards in the revival. He has also been influential in America: it was Martin who taught Paul Simon the traditional ballad “Scarborough Fair” in the 1960s. Martin has received every honor and accolade given for folk music in England, and has been awarded an MBE for services to Folk Music, roughly equivalent to receiving a National Heritage Fellowship in the United States.
We're back with another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! In this episode, John Fenn and I talk about some of our favorite items in the archive, including a Nagra IV-S portable tape recorder, and invite Jennifer Cutting along to talk about commercial recordings of traditional folk dance tunes collected by the English folklorist Cecil Sharp. We used the opportunity to honor folklorists Tony Barrand, who built upon Cecil Sharp's dance scholarship, and Mick Moloney, who made some great recordings on our Nagras. Barrand and Moloney both passed away in the last year. As usual, I'll present more complete recordings of the music and other related collections in this blog post, along with links to download the podcast itself.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with The Armagh Rhymers, one of the most celebrated traditional music and theatre ensembles on the island of Ireland. As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
In this post we examine some of the earliest evidence of the Cornish May Song, also known as "Hal An Tow." A version of this song was recorded from Lillian Short in Missouri by Vance Randolph in 1941. By that time, the melody to the song had changed in oral tradition, but this early evidence, a written transcription by Edward Jones from 1802, shows that the song was formerly sung to the same melody retained by Lillian Short. The post includes Jones's 1802 passage describing the May 8 observances in Helston, Cornwall, which include the "Hal An Tow" song, the "Furry Dance" or "Flora Dance," and other events; the sheet music as he published it; and a discussion of Jones's interpretations of the Helston song in relation to AFC's field recording.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with Vrï, a trio from Wales in the U.K., whose members describe their music as 'chamber-folk.' The idea of the series is to gather concert videos, video interviews with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections together in one place for our subscribers...so here we go!
Bringing together the experience of Jordan Price Williams (cello, voice) Patrick Rimes (violin, viola, foot percussion, voice) and Aneirin Jones (violin, voice) Vrï plays tunes and songs from the Celtic nations and beyond, attempting to combine the energy of a rowdy pub session with the style and finesse of the Viennese string quartet. They combine high-energy dance music and stately traditional melodies with delicate arrangements, and sing in both Welsh and English.
We're back with another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! To round out both Women's History Month and Irish American Heritage Month, we're presenting A Tribute to Irish American Women. As usual, I'll present links to relevant blog posts, videos, and audio selections in this post, as well as the link to download the podcast.
Welcome to another post in our Homegrown Plus series, in which we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both videos together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We're continuing the series with Iona Fyfe, who is a folksinger from Aberdeenshire in the North East of Scotland. Iona is recognized as one of Scotland’s finest young ballad singers, rooted deeply in the singing traditions of the North East. Winner of Scots Singer of the Year at the MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards 2018, Iona has been described by Global Music Magazine as “one of the best Scotland has to offer.” In her Homegrown concert, Iona sang a variety of traditional ballads associated with her part of Scotland. She also honored the American Folklife Center by taking what we call the "Archive Challenge": learning a song from one of our archival recordings. In Iona's case, the song was "The White Fisher," as sung by Bell Duncan in the James Madison Carpenter collection. In our conversation, Iona and I talked about a lot of topics, including the influence of great archival collections on Scottish folksinging; the importance of regional identity in Scottish music; the experience of getting a traditional music degree from a conservatory; the influence of teachers like Rod Paterson, Margaret Bennett, and Ian Russell; and Iona's plans to draw further on AFC's James Madison Carpenter collection. Watch both videos right here in this blog post!
