This is a guest post from Lotus Norton-Wisla, an intern at the American Folklife Center working to improve access to materials in the Alan Lomax Collection related to choreometrics, which was Lomax’s methodology for studying dance performance style. These materials consist of more than 70 boxes of paper materials and more than 3,500 film elements. …
[This post is part of a series of blog posts about the song “Hal An Tow.” You can find the whole series at this link.] As you can read in Stephanie Hall’s Post “May Day: A Festival of Flowers,” on May Day, or May 1, people in Europe traditionally celebrated the coming of summer …
May Eve, April 30th, and May Day, May first, have long been part of the celebration of spring in Europe. The flowering of fruit trees and sowing season were important to agriculturalists in the hope of a good harvest. Lambing, kidding, and calving season had passed, so animals could be allowed out to more remote …