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Category: Folk Music

Woman stands on stage of auditorium speaking to crowd with a hand held microphone.

Staff Spotlight: Melanie Zeck On Collaborating with National Philharmonic

Posted by: John Fenn

This guest post is by Melanie Zeck, one of our Reference Specialists at the American Folklife Center. As the stage door opened, blindingly bright lights struck my eyes.  I strode over to the piano, sensing that the audience was following my every move.  At that moment, I   realized that no one—not even the orchestra members …

The Burgess Hall String Band on the Wheeling Jamboree: A Family Connection

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Filed away in the archives of the American Folklife Center is a little piece of radio history in the form of an oral history interview and eleven black and white photographs. The subject of the interview is Burgess Hall, who began playing music with his siblings around the age of eight. In the 1930s, Burgess and several of his friends began performing music at shows in West Virginia and Kentucky. During their three-year stint as the Burgess Hall String Band, they were invited to play several shows in Wheeling, West Virginia, including radio shows "Wheeling Jamboree" and "It's Wheeling Steel." In this guest blog post, AFC folklife specialist Meg Nicholas describes the collection, shows us some of the photos, and reveals a touching connection to her own family.

2018 National Heritage Fellows on-stage at the Library of Congress

AFC Announces New Research Guide on the NEA’s National Heritage Fellowship

Posted by: Douglas D. Peach

The American Folklife Center (AFC) is proud to announce a new research guide, which highlights AFC collections related to the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Heritage Fellowship is the highest honor for the traditional arts in the United States. Since 1982, the award has recognized lifetime achievement among traditional artists and advocates for the traditional arts. On Friday, September 29, 2023, the American Folklife Center will be hosting a public ceremony to honor the 2023 recipients of the National Heritage Fellowship. Awardees of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 National Heritage Fellowship will also be celebrated, as the COVID-19 pandemic inhibited their in-person recognition. Find about about the new guide and the ceremony in this blog post!

Print shows the president's box at Ford's Theater with John Wilkes Booth, on the right, shooting President Lincoln who is seated at the front of the box; on the left are Mary Todd Lincoln seated in the front, Major Henry Rathbone rising to stop Booth, and Clara Harris standing behind Mrs. Lincoln

Caught My Ear: Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Booth Killed Lincoln”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

For many years, the song "Booth" or "Booth Killed Lincoln" has been considered a prime example of a traditional ballad about a historical event. Telling in remarkable detail the story of John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, the ballad seems ripped from contemporary headlines. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who sang the song for the Library of Congress in 1949, has been credited as the song's collector, and many sources indicate a date of about 1890 as the latest possible origin for the song, since Lunsford said he heard his father sing "some of the stanzas" to the fiddle tune "Booth." But is there another possible explanation of the song's origins? In this post, we'll look more closely at Lunsford's various recordings of "Booth," as well as unpublished primary-source and secondary-source evidence in the AFC archive, to try to piece together the birth of "Booth."

Black and white photograph of a woman sitting at a desk.

The Alice Fletcher Korean Cylinder Recordings : A Small Part of D.C. History

Posted by: Allina Migoni

Alice Cunningham Fletcher, anthropologist and ethnologist, is most known for her work with Native American groups and her early field recordings of Native American culture. However, this blog will focus another aspect of Fletcher’s fieldwork, a small group of rare and invaluable recordings of traditional Korean music, which she made on July 24, 1896. These cylinders contain the earliest known recordings of Korean music in the world, and predate the next documented recording of Korean song by 11 years. Specifically, they contain songs sung by Korean students whose names are often transliterated today as Ahn Jeong-sik, Lee Hee-Cheol and Son Rong. In this blog you can see a video lecture by Robert Provine about the cylinders, and hear four songs from the collection. These fascinating Korean recordings testify to the historical significance of AFC's cylinder collections to diverse communities all over the world.

Half-length portrait of a young man playing guitar

Ten Thousand Cattle for Our One Thousandth Post

Posted by: Stephen Winick

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.

Woman playing a banjo onstage

Caught My Ear: The Pineconers Live at Albert Hall, 1983!

Posted by: John Fenn

Every so often I dive into our online collections in search of interesting fieldwork materials to share, especially anything from the large-scale field surveys that the Center facilitated from the late 1970s on through the mid- 1990s (visit an interactive Story Map about these projects). Just the other day I visited the Pinelands Folklife Project collection, used the faceted search options to pull together all audio files also tagged as “songs” and started listening. One particular 32-minute field recording caught my ear, so I’ve shared it in full in this blog.

A person stands outdoors in front of a stone wall, holding a fiddle.

AFC Kicks off Homegrown 2023 with Jake Blount February 23

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The American Folklife Center is kicking off the 2023 Homegrown concert series with a solo performance by banjo player, fiddler, and singer Jake Blount, an award-winning musician and scholar of African American musical traditions. Blount draws on historical sources for his music, including field recordings in the AFC archive. Blount's performance will be part of Live! at the Library and the Black History Month celebrations at the Library of Congress, and is presented in cooperation with the Folklore Society of Greater Washington. The concert is at 6:00 pm in the Members Room (LJ 162) in the historic Thomas Jefferson Building.

A promotional graphic featuring a photo of Community Collections Grant recipient Mark Boots Lupenui

Community Collections Grants: An Interview with Mark “Boots” Lupenui

Posted by: Michelle Stefano

Below is an excerpt from an interview by Folklife Specialist Guha Shankar with Community Collections Grant recipient Mark “Boots” Lupenui entitled, “Heirloom Songs” from Kohala, Hawai’i: Documenting a Fragile Musical Legacy, as part of a series on the Library’s Of the People blog featuring the 2022 awardees of the AFC’s Community Collections Grants program. The …