The following installment in Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus post introduces James P. Leary, a distinguished folklorist and researcher who has published extensively on Library of Congress collections in the American Folklife Center. In addition to his lecture video, it includes photos, audio, and video from AFC's collections of Midwestern folk music, including Croatian, French, Scandinavian, Oneida, English, Welsh, and other ethnic groups. Most of the quotations from Leary in this article come from an email interview we did in July 2015, but I also quote occasionally from the lecture itself, which is also here as an embedded video.
Note: The whole AFC staff was saddened by the death of Jean Ritchie earlier this month. We paid tribute to her immediately in a Facebook post, which you can see here, and the Chairman of our Board of Trustees, C. Kurt Dewhurst, made a moving statement about Jean at the Board’s June meeting. However, I …
At the American Folklife Center, researchers come from around the world to study our unparalleled documentation of traditional culture. But sometimes, they don’t even have to come here. Occasionally, new discoveries by our staff are so exciting or so curious that we feel prominent researchers need to know. For this reason, our reference librarians keep …
Last week, the Library announced this year’s inductees to the National Recording Registry. There, along with classics by The Doors, Radiohead, Steve Martin, and Joan Baez, was a fascinating AFC collection: The Benjamin Ives Gilman Collection Recorded at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago. This collection of 101 wax cylinder recordings was created by …
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center’s Judith Gray, an ethnomusicologist who curates the largest body of early recordings of indigenous American songs and stories recorded in the United States. After all the identifying, rehousing, cataloging, labeling, barcoding, and databasing activity on the part of AFC staff over the past year, the actual …
Judith Gray, a specialist in Native American cultures, has been spending a lot of quality time down in the chilly decks of the Library’s Jefferson building lately. She curates the largest body of early recordings of indigenous American music and stories in the United States contained on nearly ten thousand wax cylinders. When not on …
As I have mentioned several times on this blog, the 100th birthday of Alan Lomax is fast approaching. We’ll be celebrating the birthday itself with an exhibit, and then extending our celebrations throughout the year. However, today I thought it might be fun to show you that we’ve already gotten a jump on our celebrations …
On behalf of all my colleagues at the American Folklife Center, I’m very sad to say that Judith McCulloh, a pivotal figure in the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology, and a crucial friend of AFC and its staff, passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning, July 13. Judy was a truly remarkable folklorist …
This is a guest post by Folklife Specialist Ann Hoog, who coordinates AFC’s internship program. This is the second in a two-part series stemming from a conversation with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan. Part I was about how he went from having an established career in software engineering to becoming a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology. Today, …
