A few years ago, my esteemed colleague Ellen Terrell wrote an excellent blog post at Inside Adams, examining from a business perspective the firm of Scrooge and Marley, the fictional business at the center of Charles Dickens’s classic work of Christmas literature, A Christmas Carol. I thought I would see what an ethnographic perspective could …
Episode Fourteen of the Folklife Today Podcast (or Season 2, Episode 2) is ready for listening! The episode presents a deep dive into a single song, known either as "The Candidate's a Dodger" or simply as "The Dodger." In the episode, Thea Austen, Jennifer Cutting, and I look at the classic folksong , discussing the song’s meanings in oral tradition, its use by Aaron Copland as an art song, and its involvement in political controversy in the 1930s, when Charles Seeger first published it. We examine the song’s history and lay out new evidence about its relationships to other folksongs and to a musical theater song from 1840s England. We also discuss the possibility that Charles Seeger, a founder of ethnomusicology and a pioneering federal folklorist, was himself a “dodger!” The episode includes performances by folksingers Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger, and Peggy Seeger, as well as baritone Thomas Hampson, and five field recordings from the Library of Congress.
Episode Eleven of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! In this episode, John Fenn and I discuss two more hidden folklorists, writer Charles J. Finger and filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Charles J. Finger collected folklore …
This blog post about the Arkansas writer Charles J. Finger is part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. A series of sepia-toned photographs held by the University of Arkansas Library’s Special Collections division shows an amiable-looking young man with luxuriant …
In Part VI, we examined UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention and some of its underlying notions and approaches that have influenced the development of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) framework of today. In particular, I singled out its use of listing – namely, the World Heritage List – as a mechanism for preservation by drawing …
The American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the 2019 recipients of its three competitive annual fellowships and awards programs: the Archie Green Fellowships; the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award; and the Blanton Owen Award. This year, these three awards went to eleven projects throughout the …
As you may have figured out, our previous post about having discovered the origin of all folklore everywhere was an April Fools’ Day practical joke. If you followed the link to the podcast, you actually heard about the roots of the April Fools’ Day tradition. This post is to set the record straight! Episode six …
Episode six of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! In this exciting episode, folklorists at the American Folklife Center announce that we have discovered the origin of all folklore everywhere! The artist …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with Newpoli, an ensemble based in Massachusetts playing folk songs and dance music from southern Italy, mainly from the regions of Campania and Puglia. …
