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Category: Native American History

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

A Q&A with new staff folklorist-archivist Kelly Revak

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

Kelly Revak is a new processing archivist at the American Folklife Center. She has a master’s degree in folklore and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Cumulatively, she has 20 years of experience in archives, including 7 years in various capacities at the Berkeley Folklore Archive. Since starting her job …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Moving Day and a Major Anniversary

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

This is a guest post by American Folklife Center’s Judith Gray, an ethnomusicologist who curates the largest body of early recordings of indigenous American songs and stories recorded in the United States. After all the identifying, rehousing, cataloging, labeling, barcoding, and databasing activity on the part of AFC staff over the past year, the actual …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Preparing thousands of the earliest ethnographic recordings on wax cylinders for transfer to the National Audio-visual Conservation Center

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

Judith Gray, a specialist in Native American cultures, has been spending a lot of quality time down in the chilly decks of the Library’s Jefferson building lately. She curates the largest body of early recordings of indigenous American music and stories in the United States contained on nearly ten thousand wax cylinders. When not on …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

It’s Never too Late to be an Ethnomusicologist: A Conversation with AFC Intern Kirk Sullivan, Part II

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

This is a guest post by Folklife Specialist Ann Hoog, who coordinates AFC’s internship program. This is the second in a two-part series stemming from a conversation with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan. Part I was about how he went from having an established career in software engineering to becoming a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology. Today, …