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 …
On this snowy January day, I’d like to wish the readers of Folklife Today a happy end to the holiday season. Many people take down their Christmas decorations immediately after the day itself, and others use New Year’s Day as the end of their holiday. But among many communities, the Christmas season culminates after Twelfth …
The Following is a guest post by Judith Gray, ethnomusicologist and coordinator of reference in the American Folklife Center. In the last decades of the 19th century, Thomas Edison and his contemporaries in Europe created various devices for capturing sound [1]. These inventions, in turn, led to the creation of audiovisual archives. The first two …
Today marks the 67th birthday of the U.S. Air Force. As the nation’s strategic, tactical and defensive force for the skies, the U.S. Air Force was officially founded by the National Security Act of 1947. Although they belong to the youngest branch of the U.S. armed forces, advancements in both science and society allow …
August 22 is an important date to folklore fans. It is, in fact, the anniversary of the first appearance of the (originally hyphenated) word “Folk-Lore” in print. The medium was a letter to the editor of the Athenæum, a scholarly journal, and the author was William John Thoms, although he wrote the letter under his …
Folklorist Trevor J. Blank is an assistant professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Readers of Folklife Today might enjoy a series of posts on the Library of Congress’s digital preservation blog, The Signal. In a two-part Insights Interview series, folklorist Trevor J. Blank talks about digital culture on the …
The following is a guest post by Nancy Groce, Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center. It originated as opening remarks for the forum Coffeehouses: Folk Music, Culture, and Counterculture, which was held last week in the Library’s Montpelier Room. Webcasts of the event will eventually be added to the Library’s website and accessible …
In my last post, I discussed the more serious side of songs about Noah’s ark. As I mentioned, though, there are other songs too, often with more celebratory messages–or even silly ones. We’ll look at some of those Noah songs in this post. Celebratory songs tend to focus on the joy felt by Noah when …
In a letter dated November 16, 1918, an Army Private First Class stationed near Verdun, France, wrote to his mother, Dear Mother: By firelight on the fought-over ground of this stricken country I pause to rush word to you of my safety + well being. The last three weeks were terrible + of them I …
