Happy Holidays from the American Folklife Center! As in years past, we enlivened Library life last week with performances of a traditional Mummers play, updated for modern times. The title of this year’s play is "Keeping Cool and Dry for the Holidays: A Film Preservation Mumming," and it’s all about Film Preservation and the National Film Registry. It takes place at the Northpole Audio Visual Preservation Pavilion (NAVPP). St. George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life) is confronted by Connor MacLeod (Highlander series), who has a dastardly plan to get his terrible movies on the registry by undermining the preservation of all other films. The play includes Film Preservation Board members like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, some of our usual characters, and some surprises, including a reenactment of the “Let’s all go to the Lobby” song—which is actually on the real registry. Mummers’ plays are short 15-minute plays, traditionally performed in Britain, Ireland, North America, and the West Indies at holiday time, as the Mummers went from house to house and pub to pub, collecting food, drink, and small change as a reward for their entertainment. The American Folklife Center’s archive boasts one of the largest collections of English Mummers’ Play texts in the world, in its James Madison Carpenter collection. In this blog post you'll find the text of the play and lots of fun photos--plus a wealth of links to explore!
We're back with another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! In this latest Halloween episode, John Fenn and I continue our discussion with Hanna Salmon about the new Research Guide "Folktales and Oral Storytelling: Resources in the American Folklife Center Collections." Then we introduce some of our favorite spooky stories: the ghost legend "The Vanishing Hitchhiker" as told by students Marty Weathers and Bill Henry of Georgia; the witch story "Skin, Don't You Know Me" as told by master storyteller J. D. Suggs of Mississippi and later Michigan; and the truly spooky tale of "The Two White Horses," told by the great Connie Regan-Blake, a leading Appalachian storyteller who has lived in Tennessee and North Carolina among other places. Of course, in addition to some chat about the tales, the episode showcases the stories themselves. This blog post shows you how to find the podcast and gives you some additional background on the stories and storytellers. So prepare for a scare and give us a listen!
Happy holidays from the American Folklife Center! Watch a video of the AFC Mummers performing our 2023 mummers play! Then you can read the play, see the pictures, and even read the annotations if you’re interested in the history of holiday customs. This year’s play is called “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity: A Literary Ball Mumming.” When Artificial Intelligence tries to make writers obsolete, can St. George Eliot, Sherlock Holmes and Enola Holmes save the day? Find out in this play set at the North Pole Library Literary Ball, which includes wassailing carols and dancing to traditional tunes as well!
Mummers plays are short plays which were traditionally performed in Britain, Ireland, colonial America and the West Indies at holiday time. Mummers went from house to house and pub to pub, collecting food, drink and small change as a reward for their entertainment. The American Folklife Center’s archive boasts a large collections of British mummers play texts in its James Madison Carpenter Collection.
This is an entry in our occasional series on the Green Man, a figure from traditional folk culture. Among the traditional meanings shared by the figures of the Foliate Head and the Wild Man or Green Man seems to have been that humanity, like vegetation, must follow and adapt to the changing seasons. This traditional meaning could well have given rise to a connection between the Green Man and calendar customs, which goes back to some of the earliest appearances of the figure. In this post we’ll look more closely at the Green Man as an element of seasonal celebration.
In this post, we're providing a Blast from Holidays Past, featuring graphic art that we used in the Halloween and Dia de Muertos exhibit LOC Halloween: Chambers of Mystery. As part of that exhibit, which occurred here at the Library of Congress back in 2017, we presented some spooky covers from the Brazilian chapbook genre known as literatura de cordel, as well as some posters created by Library of Congress artist Joon Yi. See these beautiful examples of graphic arts here in the blog, then follow the link to our updated resource guide to Halloween and Dia de Muertos!
For Dia de los Muertos 2023, we thought we'd add some never-before-seen photos to the blog of a classic Dia de los Muertos celebration 24 years ago. These photos were submitted to the American Folklife Center as part of Local Legacies, a collection project undertaken by the American Folklife Center in the late 1990s to help celebrate the Library's Bicentennial in 2000. Members of Congress participated in identifying and documenting traditions. Representative Barbara Lee's team submitted the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) festival from the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California. Project documentation in the collection included nine 8 x 10 color photographs, which we're reproducing in this blog.
In this podcast episode, John Fenn, Michelle Stefano, and Stephen Winick discuss Groundhog Day traditions. Drawing on the research of Don Yoder, they discuss the history and folklore of the holiday, including groundhog traditions among the Pennsylvania Dutch, weather proverbs, and even cooking and eating groundhogs! There are even four groundhog songs! Find the link to the podcast in this blog post!
Happy Holidays from the American Folklife Center! In this blog post, you can enjoy our 2022 holiday mummers' play. As you may know, every year, in the week of the Library’s holiday party, staff members of the American Folklife Center put our research and performance skills into play, bringing collections to life in a dramatic performance that tours the halls of the Library of Congress. Dressed in costumes that range from striking to silly, we sing, act, rhyme, and dance for other Library staff members and for members of the public. Our performances are based on the ancient tradition of mumming, which has come down to our archive in the form of play scripts, songs, photos, and other items collected in the early twentieth century. This year's play was called The Flute of Ice: A Mumming from the Vault. This blog post includes the video, the script, explanatory notes, and still photos from the performance and dress rehearsal.
Hanukkah this year will be celebrated from December 18 to December 26. Jewish children all over the world will be playing a gambling game with a traditional spinning top known as a dreidel. Many of them will also be told stories about the origin and meaning of the dreidel, stories which claim that the dreidel once had a subversive purpose or that it was created to commemorate a great miracle. These stories are themselves interesting folklore. Since the dreidel is a traditional toy used to play a traditional game, such stories about the dreidel and game can be called metafolklore--that is, folklore about folklore. In this blog, we'll take a look at some of these stories about the origin of the dreidel and examine the toy's real history.
