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.
The National Day of the Cowboy is coming up soon (the fourth Saturday of July), prompting me to go sifting through the archive for collection items to highlight. The national day officially began in 2008, when the National Day of the Cowboy resolution passed in both the Senate and the House, though there had been …
In honor of National Prairie Day, AFC Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas highlights the songs and stories in the American Folklife Center's archive that evoke the tall grass and sweeping winds of the North American prairie states and provinces.
On April 27, 2023, the American Folklife Center (AFC) joined four other divisions at the Library of Congress to welcome a delegation from Hawai'i. Attendees included members of two Royal Families, as well as representatives of the 'Ionali Palace in Honolulu and the Daughters of Hawai'i, an organization founded to preserve Hawaiian language, culture, and collective memory. The delegation enjoyed presentations about the Library's Hawaiian collections, and four delegates sang a beautiful version of "Lili'uokalani's Prayer," a composition written by the last monarch and Queen of Hawai'i, Lili'uokalani, who ruled from 1891 to 1893. Read about the visit and about AFC's Hawaiian collections in this guest blog post by Douglas D. Peach.
Learn about the fascinating character "Daca," a bookseller in New York who taught Alan Lomax the cowboy classic "Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle." Daca contributed ten songs and a sheaf of tall tales to the Library of Congress. He was a cowboy in the 1910s and a bookshop owner in Bohemian Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 30s, while he moonlighted by singing cowboy songs on the radio. He had a master's degree in Spanish and was an expert on European fables. He also went by at least three names (Harry Payne Reeves, David Daca, and Harry Reece). Daca was a fascinating forerunner both of Woody Guthrie, another cowboy singer who arrived in New York just as Daca left, and of Bob Dylan, a trickster who concealed his identity with aliases and gave evasive answers to interviewers. In this way, he laid the groundwork and established some of the norms for the folk scene in Greenwich Village. Read his story, hear his songs, and find out about a little known "hidden folklorist"--all in this blog post!
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 is delighted to announce the acquisition of the Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts collection from Julia Olin and Barry Bergey. The collection includes concert recordings of iconic blues and old time musicians like Henry Townsend and Robert Jr. Lockwood; festival performances from the Frontier Folk Festival; fiddling traditions from Ozark and Midwestern regions; and traditional arts documentation from around the state of Missouri. Communities documented include the French speaking towns around Old Mines, Native American communities, and several Spanish speaking communities. Bergey and Olin wrote this blog post to introduce the collection to researchers at the American Folklife Center.
The following is a guest post by American Folklife Center head of reference, Judith Gray. Staff at the American Folklife Center continue to use new digital tools to support remote discovery and access for our resources by users of all kinds. Whether you are a community scholar, a teacher, an academic researcher, a creative artist, …
Staff at the American Folklife Center continue to use new digital tools to support remote discovery and access for our resources by users of all kinds. Whether you are a community scholar, a teacher, an academic researcher, a creative artist, or a curious consumer of local culture we hope that our geographically-oriented research guides offer …
