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Summer Songs on the Folklife Today Podcast

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Season 3, Episode 9 of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it on the Library’s website, or on Stitcher, iTunes, or your usual podcatcher. In this episode John Fenn and I, along with guests Nicole Saylor and Jennifer Cutting, look at songs on summer themes. The podcast includes Appalachian, African American, French Canadian, Finnish, Tuvan, and Irish songs. As usual, I present links to relevant blog posts, videos, and audio selections in this post.

AFC’s New Story Map and Research Guide for Higher Education

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The American Folklife Center is happy to present our newest research guide, American Folklife Center’s Higher Education Resources, and story map, The American Folklife Center Online, which are both dedicated to assisting instructors in higher education in exploring our collections and related materials, inspiring ways in which they can be integrated into teaching. Last fall, we announced plans for bolstering the AFC’s outreach to higher education, making our resources more accessible to the college and university community. We administered a survey, whose results revealed what our friends in higher education felt they needed from us. In hopes to answer those needs, we present this research guide and Story Map…we hope you enjoy these new AFC resources!

Collection Connections: Hubby Jenkins Homegrown Concert, August 11

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We’re excited for this week’s Homegrown concert from Hubby Jenkins, who will be playing old-time songs and spirituals that are the root of American folk, country, blues, and gospel. The concert premieres at noon on August 11 on our Facebook page. After that, the concert will be available permanently at his concert page, where you can also read more about Hubby. For now, I’ll just say that he’s an old-time and blues musician living in New York. He’s a singer and multi-instrumentalist who plays guitars, banjos, mandolins, and bones. He has been a member of the Rhiannon Giddens Band, and before that the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.  As a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, he played at the Library of Congress back in 2012. In this post, I’ll try to whet your appetites by talking about a few of the songs Hubby plays in the concert, and presenting related field recordings from our collections.

2021 Folklife Interns: Welcome Aboard!

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The American Folklife Center staff is thrilled to welcome our 2021 Folklife Interns: Camille Acosta and Kennedi Johnson. It was a competitive application pool this year, with over 350 candidates—and extremely difficult to make final selections! They’ve both officially “on-boarded” at this point and are navigating the challenges and opportunities of doing a full-time internship […]

Crowdsourcing Transcriptions: “At the Library and in the Field: John and Alan Lomax Papers”

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This guest post comes from Todd Harvey, a Reference Specialist and the curator of Lomax collections at the American Folklife Center. To the Librarian of Congress March 21, 1940 Alan Lomax has in Washington with him today and tomorrow a folk singer for whose excellence he vouchers. This singer, Woodie Guthrie by name, is willing […]

AFC Fellowship and Award Recipients 2021

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The American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the 2021 recipients of its three competitive annual fellowships and awards programs: the Archie Green Fellowships, the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award, and Blanton Owen Fund Award. This year, these three awards went to nine projects throughout the […]

“God put the good stuff where lazy people can’t have any”: Exploring West Virginia Foodways in a New AFC Film Series

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The following is a guest post by West Virginia State Folklorist Emily Hilliard, who directs the West Virginia Folklife Program, based at the West Virginia Humanities Council. AFC staff have been working with Emily, as well as Mike Costello and Amy Dawson of Lost Creek Farm, to co-produce the Homegrown Foodways in West Virginia program, […]