We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Vigüela, a a traditional folk quintet with a commitment to the rural musical traditions of central Spain. As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
Vigüela was established in the mid-1980s, after the Franco regime, by young people who looked to folk culture for a way to channel their creative desires while staying rooted in their local communities. Grounded in this history, the band members value their tradition and perform it with accuracy and energy, as a living music, full of joy. They play traditional Spanish music, including jotas, seguidillas, fandangos, and sones, using the centuries-old singing styles, dialects, and instruments of their region. That region is Castilla-La Mancha, the southern part of the Iberian plateau, sometimes called “the heart of Spain,” or “Don Quixote country.”
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with The Chosen Few, a Virginia gospel group that stands firmly in the great tradition of unaccompanied religious singing by African American residents of the Tidewater region of the mid-Atlantic states. As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
The following is a guest blog post co-authored by veteran artists Cyrus Quadland and Jara Fatout Lang. This is the last in a four-part guest series featuring military veteran artists who are members of Uniting US, a veteran-focused nonprofit arts organization. In recognition of June as Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS) Awareness month, Uniting US is collaborating …
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Chao Tian, a master of the yangqin, or Chinese hammered dulcimer, as well as a sound designer and visual artist. For her concert, Chao Tian is joined by Tom Teasley, a multidimensional percussionist, performer, and composer. As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
We're filling in the Homegrown Plus series with one that got away, our great 2020 concert with Walter Parks, one of the first "Homegrown at Home" concerts. Walter is a consummate guitarist who founded the duo The Nudes before spending more than a decade as the lead guitarist for Woodstock legend Richie Havens. We're particularly happy to present this concert, which showcased our collections in a unique and compelling way. Walter has done extensive research on our 1944 recordings of Okefenokee Swamp music made by Francis Harper. He has arranged material from the collection for his own performances, including his Homegrown Concert, which is almost entirely made up of material from the collection. If that weren't enough, Walter made the journey from his current home in St. Louis all the way down to the Chesser homestead, so he could record part of his concert video in the same place where the archival recordings were made. It gives his concert an extraordinary sense of place, and we're particularly delighted to present it to you here.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with our first concert to feature Sami music, performed by the fascinating singer, songwriter, and musician Annamaret. The American Folklife Center was very happy to co-sponsor this concert with our friends at the Embassy of Finland. Annamaret's project Nieguid duovdagat has earned her some of the top honors available for folk music in Finland, including Folk Music Record of the Year for 2021. For her Homegrown concert, Annamaret performed songs from Nieguid duovdagat, accompanied by the same musicians who featured on the award-winning recording: Ilkka Heinonen, who specializes in folk music on the jouhikko, G-violone and contrabass; and Turkka Inkila, who plays flutes and electronic instruments. In our conversation, I spoke with Annamaret about Sami culture, the Sami's status as the only Indigenous community in Europe, and the impact of colonialism on Sami life. And, of course, we spoke about Sami music, including yoik, and her own career as a musician and cultural advocate. Watch both the concert and the interview in this blog post, and find links to some further Sami resources you can explore.
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both videos together in an easy-to-find blog post. We're proud to continue the series with Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, an American roots music duo based in New York's Catskill Mountains. They are best known for their work on the soundtrack of Ken Burns's PBS documentary series, The Civil War. Jay's composition "Ashokan Farewell" became the musical centerpiece of the Grammy-winning soundtrack and was nominated for an Emmy. Their performance left a lasting impression on everyone who tuned in. Jay’s fiddling is known for playfulness, drama, soul and technical verve, as he explores many musical styles and idioms that he has internalized and made his own. Molly’s inventiveness on piano and guitar supports the tunes and follows the flow of the melody. Her rich and expressive vocals round out the experience of their award-winning concert presentations.
