The American Folklife Center mourns the passing of Anthony Grant "Tony" Barrand, a singer, dancer, teacher, and folklorist who donated the Anthony Grant Barrand Collection of Morris, Sword, and Clog Dancing (AFC 2003/005) to AFC in 2003. In addition to making this collection, Barrand has been a proponent of English folk traditions in America for more than 50 years. He was a longtime dancer as well as a singer and musician with the John Roberts and Tony Barrand duo, and with the quartet Nowell Sing We Clear. Barrand, who was born in Lincolnshire and continued growing up in Buckinghamshire, England, died on January 29, 2022 at age 76 in his adopted home of Marlboro, Vermont.
The interview was recorded to audio and video tape and is in the AFC archive. This post is the second in a series of posts, each of which will present a portion of the interview in transcribed form.
The American Folklife Center's 2021 Mummers play is about a zoom meeting that gets invaded by a hacker who won't let the participants leave until he gets a bitcoin ransom. 2021 has felt like a zoom meeting that wouldn't end, so we hope our audience can relate! Find a video of the play and the complete annotated script in this blog!
Read the text and see the photos of the American Folklife Center's holiday play! It's 1814 and the U.S. Capitol has been burned by the British. President James Madison throws Library of Congress collections in a sleigh and seeks help from Father Christmas and the preservation specialists at the North Pole Library! The latest version of our play, which tours the halls of the Library of Congress. Each year, dressed in costumes that range from striking to silly, we sing, act, rhyme, and dance for other Library staff members and for members of the public. Our performances are based on the ancient tradition of mumming, which has come down to our archive in the form of play scripts, songs, photos, and other items collected in the early twentieth century.
In my last post about the origins of Father Christmas in the 17th century, I mentioned that most English people today barely distinguish between Father Christmas and Santa Claus. This merger of the two characters is a 19th century development, and was largely complete by the turn of the 20th century. Three hundred years after …
During the holiday season, I spend a lot of time dressed in old-fashioned clothes, singing, acting, and making merry as Father Christmas. The character has been part of our AFC mummers’ play since 2010, and part of the tradition of mummers’ plays probably since its inception. Several of the earliest surviving mummers’ play texts, …
Episode three 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! Our latest podcast presents some of our favorite Christmas songs. In this blog post, I’ll present the full versions of all the songs. …
On behalf of the American Folklife Center, I am pleased to announce that our James Madison Carpenter collection is now online. The collection, which consists of manuscripts, audio, photographs, and drawings documenting British folk music, song, and drama in the first half of the 20th century, is available worldwide through the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s …
Note: this is the fifth, and probably the last, post on Folklife Today concerning Far Away Moses, a nineteenth century Jewish guide and merchant whose face was the model for one of the “keystone heads” sculpted in stone on the outside of the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson building. For the other posts about Moses, …
In our last post, we presented the text and photos of our 2016 mummers play, St. George and the Arrearage Monster: A Mumming in Process. Below, see a video of the play, shot on AFC’s trusty tablet by Jonathan Gold, our audio engineer. The acoustics in the Library’s Great Hall make it rather difficult to …
