Top of page

Category: Oral History

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

Memories of Alan Jabbour in the Field: Visiting the Hammons Family

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This recollection is in memory of the Center’s founding director, Alan Jabbour, who died on January 13, 2017, and whose career and contributions are described in this blog post.  Today’s text and photographs are by Carl Fleischhauer, a retired American Folklife Center staff member and a colleague of Alan’s for 46 years. Alan Jabbour and …

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

The American Folklife Center: 40 Years of Change

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The following post is part of a series of blog posts about the 40th Anniversary Year of the American Folklife Center. Visit this link to see them all! This year the Library’s American Folklife Center (AFC) turns 40. Detailed histories of AFC are available elsewhere [1], so we thought we’d do something different in this …

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

Honoring Vernacular Sounds: AFC Recordings on the National Recording Registry

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Last week, the Library announced this year’s inductees to the National Recording Registry.  There, along with classics by The Doors, Radiohead, Steve Martin, and Joan Baez, was a fascinating AFC collection: The Benjamin Ives Gilman Collection Recorded at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago. This collection of 101 wax cylinder recordings was created by …

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

Preserving America’s Voices: Who’s Listening?

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Note: This blog post is reprinted from Library of Congress Magazine, for which it was written by Stephen Winick and edited by Audrey Fischer.  The full issue contains two more articles about the American Folklife Center’s oral-history collections.  You can download it here. Preserving America’s Voices: Who’s Listening? How Can We Use Oral-History Collections to …