We're back with another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! In this episode, John Fenn and I talk about some of our favorite items in the archive, including a Nagra IV-S portable tape recorder, and invite Jennifer Cutting along to talk about commercial recordings of traditional folk dance tunes collected by the English folklorist Cecil Sharp. We used the opportunity to honor folklorists Tony Barrand, who built upon Cecil Sharp's dance scholarship, and Mick Moloney, who made some great recordings on our Nagras. Barrand and Moloney both passed away in the last year. As usual, I'll present more complete recordings of the music and other related collections in this blog post, along with links to download the podcast itself.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Chao Tian, a master of the yangqin, or Chinese hammered dulcimer, as well as a sound designer and visual artist. For her concert, Chao Tian is joined by Tom Teasley, a multidimensional percussionist, performer, and composer. As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Julian Kytasty, a third generation player of the bandura, a Ukrainian stringed instrument with similarities to the lute and the zither. Julian also sings beautifully and composes for the bandura and other instruments. In this blog you'll find an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
In this post, we continue presenting Jennifer Cutting’s 2003 interview with Tony Barrand, a singer, dancer, academic, writer, teacher, historian, folklorist, curator, producer, and festival organizer, who died on January 29. Barrand donated the Anthony Grant Barrand Collection of Morris, Sword, and Clog Dancing (AFC 2003/005) to AFC in 2003. This post is the fourth in a series of four posts, each of which will present a portion of the interview. In this post, Cutting and Barrand discuss the effect multiple sclerosis had on Barrand’s life and work, as well as his career from the mid 1980s until 2003 when the interview took place. It is being published on April 3, 2022, which would have been Barrand's 77th birthday.
The American Folklife Center mourns the passing of Anthony Grant "Tony" Barrand, a singer, dancer, teacher, and folklorist who donated the Anthony Grant Barrand Collection of Morris, Sword, and Clog Dancing (AFC 2003/005) to AFC in 2003. In addition to making this collection, Barrand has been a proponent of English folk traditions in America for more than 50 years. He was a longtime dancer as well as a singer and musician with the John Roberts and Tony Barrand duo, and with the quartet Nowell Sing We Clear. Barrand, who was born in Lincolnshire and continued growing up in Buckinghamshire, England, died on January 29, 2022 at age 76 in his adopted home of Marlboro, Vermont.
The interview was recorded to audio and video tape and is in the AFC archive. This post is the first in a series of posts, each of which will present a portion of the interview in transcribed form.
In a previous post, I took a look at the song “Yuba Dam,” in which a man gets in trouble with his wife and the law by answering questions honestly with the words “Yuba Dam,” only to be repeatedly misheard as saying “you be damned.” In this post, I’ll look into the deeper history of …
This guest post by AFC archivist Maya Lerman is part of a series of posts called Staff Finds During Difficult Times, in which staff members discuss collections and items that have been inspiring them while they are working at home during the covid-19 pandemic or in other difficult circumstances. Maya discusses her work on the John Cohen collection and the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection. The blog includes embedded old-time music and interviews with John Cohen and Tommy Jarrell.
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. Find the whole series here! We’re continuing the series with John Cohen and the Down Hill Strugglers performing Treasures From the Archive Roadshow. John Cohen is a founding member of the New …
Many listeners who downloaded the NPR podcast Hidden Brain, or who heard it when it aired on their local affiliates this past weekend, got a glimpse of what it’s like to research folklife collections here at the Library of Congress. In the show, host Shankar Vedantam describes a trip to the stacks to retrieve the collection …
