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

Fieldwork During the Pandemic: Upcoming Online Lectures July 13 & 20

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The American Folklife Center is happy to announce a two-part series of hour-long online Zoom presentations with live Q&A featuring recent and current Archie Green Fellows discussing the impact of the pandemic on their fieldwork experiences. We're calling the event Occupational Folklife and Fieldwork in the Post-Pandemic World: Adaptation, Innovation, and the Future, Parts 1 & 2.  Registration is required, but don't worry...you'll find the registration links down near the bottom of this post!

A woman plays Chinese Zheng

Homegrown Plus: Ann Yao

Posted by: Stephen Winick

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!) This time, though, there’s a twist: Ann Yao, who performed in the 2020 series, also presented a Homegrown concert way back in 2011 with the Ann …

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

At Home Archive Challenge: Active Duty and Veterans Edition

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Back near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we suggested a new challenge to keep folks busy while waiting out the worst at home. The idea was a variation on our popular "Archive Challenge," in which you base a work of art on an item in our archive. This post suggests ideas for archive challenges that might appeal to active-duty service members and veterans, and sets up a future post about Veterans History Project collections.

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

Native American Cylinder Recordings at No Depression

Posted by: Stephen Winick

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been working with No Depression, The Journal of Roots Music, which is published by the nonprofit Freshgrass Foundation. They’re publishing a column called Roots in the Archive, featuring content from the American Folklife Center and Folklife Today. Find the series at this link, over at their website! The latest Roots in …

Margo Hale smiling

Military Veterans Cultivate Agriculture Careers

Posted by: Lisa Taylor

The following is a guest blog post by Margo Hale, Southeast Regional Director of the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), and moderator of the Veterans History Project’s (VHP) virtual discussion panel, “Veteran Grown: Urban Farming.”  My maternal grandfather left the timber stands of South Arkansas to serve in World War I. When he returned, …

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

Get Your Daily Dose of Archive Challenge the Week of March 15

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Every day next week, March 15-21, at noon Eastern time, you can listen to, and sing along with, a respected musician performing a song from the American Folklife Center archive at the Library of Congress. That's because next week, the American Folklife Center is working with the Daily Antidote of Song, a daily online concert and singalong in which diverse singers lead a single song each day at noon Eastern time. Next week, starting March 15, all the singers will be performing songs they learned from the AFC archive! AFC staff members Stephen Winick and Jennifer Cutting will be there to co-host each day's Antidote as well. Gallery of images featuring Dom Flemons, Low Lily, Hubby Jenkins, Kumera Zekarias, Steve Winick & Jennifer Cutting, Kevin Elam, and Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer. March 15: Jennifer Cutting & Steve Winick/ March 16: Low Lily/ March 17: Kevin Elam/ March 18: Dom Flemons/ March 19: Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer/ March 20: Hubby Jenkins/ March 21: Kumera Zekarias

Head and shoulders portrait of a woman.

Caught Our Ears: Two French Songs from Maine

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In this blog, Stephen Winick looks into the mysterious background of two French-language folksongs in AFC's Maine Acadian Cultural Survey collection, "Fox Henry" or "Faux Henry," sung by Ida Burgoin Roy, and "Chambre et chaînes" sung by Connie Morin Desrosier. He identifies other versions of each song and provides audio, transcriptions, translations, and pictures of the singers.

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

The Green Book and African American Travel with Candacy Taylor on the Folklife Today Podcast

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Season 3, Episode 4 of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! In this episode, John Fenn and I interview Candacy Taylor, whose latest project is documenting sites associated with the Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. Taylor discusses the dangers inherent in travel for Black people during an era where racial discrimination was legal and open racism was common. She fills us in on the origins of the Green Book. We discuss sites such as Dooky Chase’s restaurant in New Orleans, where owner Leah Chase slapped the hand of President Barack Obama for adding hot sauce to her famous gumbo, and where she fed a young Michael Jackson her signature sweet potato pie. We also discuss the historic Hampton House, a Jewish-owned hotel in Miami, where a young boxer named Cassius Clay met Malcolm X and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and where Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced his most famous speech.

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

Freedom Summer 1964 – SNCC remembers

Posted by: Guha Shankar

At the conclusion of his 2014 keynote address on guarantees enshrined in the Constitution but historically denied to African Americans, Bob Moses – freedom rights activist, educator, and MacArthur Genius award winner – summarized the state of the nation thus: “And we are a country that lurches. We lurch forward and backward, forward and backward. …