This interview by AFC staff member, Guha Shankar, with Sarah Bryan, Executive Director of the cutural arts organization, the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), highlights ACE's work in producing a range of programs and publications that raise public awareness of the richness and diversity of global expressive culture. ACE works in collaboration with the Library in several areas. particularly initiatives that center on the merican Folklife Center's seminal Alan Lomax collecton of world music, song and dance recordings.
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 …
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.
