This blog highlights a new episode of the Folklife Today podcast, which explores an important collection of Gullah Geechee sound recordings in the archives of the American Folklife Center. The collection features over four hours of Gullah Geechee people singing sacred music, preaching to congregations, and giving testimonies in 1955 and 1956. Courtney Siceloff, then-director of Penn Community Services, recorded this collection at community centers and churches across St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Dr. Eric Crawford, Interim Chair of the Music Department at Claflin University and the author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (University of South Carolina Press), joins this episode to contextualize these recordings and to inform listeners about the people who made them.
The artist known by the single name “Francilia,” whom we featured in a recent post, was one of the most prolific singers Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded on their 1936-37 trip to Haiti. In all, they recorded 96 songs sung by Francilia, who was known in the local community as a rèn chante (queen of song). Her repertoire ranged from religious songs to secular love songs, and she performed solo and with groups. Following the repatriation of Lomax’s collection to Haiti, Haitian musicians were able to hear Francilia, and in 2019 the group Lakou Mizik recorded one of her songs in an Archive Challenge showcase sponsored by AFC. In this post, we continue to present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home, along with the Archive Challenge video of Lakou Mizik.
The disc labeled AFS 1250 features the great Haitian singer Francilia and the Sosyete Dereyal, a religious congregation of Vodou practitioners with whom she sang. Francilia was one of the most prolific singers Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded on their 1936-37 trip to Haiti. In all, they recorded 96 songs sung by Francilia, including solo songs and songs with the Sosyete. These ranged from religious songs to secular love songs. In this, our 1250th blog post at Folklife Today, we present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home. It’s the first of two posts about Francilia; in the second we’ll cover her influence on Haitian music today.
The latest post in the Homegrown Plus series features Ensemble Sangineto, one of the most popular groups on the Italian folk scene. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections. The ensemble Sangineto is comprised of three talented singers and instrumentalists. Adriano and Caterina Sangineto are twins -- Adriano plays Celtic harp and Caterina plays bowed psaltery. Jacopo Ventura rounds out the trio on guitar. The group sings in three-part harmony, with Caterina's clear voice taking the lead. The Sanginetos are children of a world-renowned luthier who has spent years crafting instruments for some of the leading folk and early music performers, so their childhood was spent meeting and listening to such musicians as Derek Bell of the Chieftains and Alan Stivell, a foundational artist of the Breton music revival. Ventura is a conservatory trained classical guitarist who has branched out to play many of the stringed instruments common in European and Asian folk music. Their concert takes you on a trip through Italy via a traditional song from each region, with medieval, Celtic, jazz, and contemporary stylings among others, thrown in for good measure.
In the interview, we learn about their lives and the world of Italian folk music.
The state of Minnesota is home to many traditions, communities, and forms of expressive culture. In this post, we highlight collection materials from the American Folklife Center pertaining to the folklife and cultural heritage of the North Star State.
The latest items to catch my ear in the Archive of Folk Culture are two reels of recordings of Eunice Yeatts McAlexander, a ballad singer who was recorded in 1978 as part of AFC's Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project. McAlexander, who passed away in 1990, had many wonderful versions of traditional ballads brought over to Appalachia from Britain, and she's a great source for unusual ballad texts. In addition to traditional ballads like “The Two Sisters,” “Little Massie Grove,” and “Lord Bateman,” she also sang nursery rhymes and lullabies for the collector, Wally Macnow. This blog post provides a little background on the singer and her songs, and embeds the digitized reels, photos, and detailed tape logs so you can listen and follow along.
In this post, we hear one last farewell shanty from the retired sailor Patrick Tayluer, who sang and told stories for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1942. The song tells the romantic tale of a sailor weighing anchor to leave for the port city of Rio Grande, Brazil. He says goodbye to his sweetheart and asks her to marry him when he returns. This is the final post in a series about the sea shanty singer Patrick Tayluer, and contains links to the entire series where you can find more songs and stories of the sea.
In 2024, Los Pleneros de la 21--a NYC-based organization whose members specialize in teaching and performing the Puerto Rican musical genres of bomba and plena--were awarded with a Community Collections Grant (CCG) by the American Folklife Center, to document musicians, teachers, and community members involved in bomba and plena music in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This post is an excerpt of an interview with LeAna López, the primary interviewer for the project, about the group's CCG work. The full interview is accessible on the Library of Congress' Of the People blog.
