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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 …
Posted in: Folk Music
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.
Posted in: AFC History, Folk Music
Posted by: John Fenn
This guest post is by Sarah Elizabeth Tomlinson, a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At their school’s annual Christmas performance, forty kindergarten and first-grade students in Durham, North Carolina bounced and sang along with the Library of Congress. Specifically, they performed for an audience of family and …
Posted in: Folk Music
Posted by: John Fenn
A little over a decade ago, Brooklyn-based musician and promoter, Eli Smith, merged his passion for folk music with the inspiration he got from the community of artists calling New York City home and created the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Along the ten-year journey of the Festival, Eli has engaged the American Folklife Center in numerous …
Posted in: Folk Music, John Cohen, Old Time Music
Posted by: John Fenn
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Kelly Revak. As I covered in a previous blog post, I have been exploring the “experimental recordings’ of Jesse Walter Fewkes and discovering a number of items of folkloric interest therein. One of these Fewkes recordings is at least somewhat well-known and that is this …
Posted in: Folk Music
Posted by: John Fenn
Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita is the current scholar in the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection, and has been using her time at the Library of Congress to explore materials held at the AFC related to Lomax’s 1952–53 field recording trip to Spain. In this recent guest post on the Kluge …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Folk Music
Posted by: John Fenn
Song of the Week: Barbara Allen Since my junior year in high school, when my dad handed me a copy of Tom Rush’s Blues, Songs, and Ballads (1964) the song “Barbara Allen” has held onto me. Little did I know back then that this is Child Ballad 84, that it is one of the most collected ballads …
Posted in: Charles Lafayette Todd and Robert Sonkin, Folk Music, Folksong