The disc labeled AFS 1250 features the great Haitian singer Francilia and the Sosyete Dereyal, a religious congregation of Vodou practitioners with whom she sang. Francilia was one of the most prolific singers Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded on their 1936-37 trip to Haiti. In all, they recorded 96 songs sung by Francilia, including solo songs and songs with the Sosyete. These ranged from religious songs to secular love songs. In this, our 1250th blog post at Folklife Today, we present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home. It’s the first of two posts about Francilia; in the second we’ll cover her influence on Haitian music today.
Un Homenaje: CCG Collection Pays Tribute to Houston's Chicano Music Pioneers
The AFC has launched the website, Sonidos De Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene, a fieldwork collecting project conducted through a Community Collections Grant. The blog describes the collections content, which features interviews of Houston's Chicano music pioneers conducted by community members, several of whom are musicians themselves . The blog includes audio clips and photographs and reactions to the collections and the website’s launch from an interview conducted with the Principal Investigator, Isaac Rodriguez.
The American Folklife Center is excited to announce that we’re bringing our Archive Challenge model to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, both on the National Mall and streaming live on YouTube! Our good friends and colleagues across the Mall have cooked up a great festival on the theme of “Youth and the Future of Culture.” As part of the festivities, we’ve engaged 8 groups of young musicians to learn pieces from the Archive of Folk Culture and play them on the festival’s main stage. Youth Archive Challenge sets will occur on July 2, 4, 5, and 7 and will feature Irish American tunes, Hungarian folk dance, Anglo American traditional ballads, American old-time music, Persian Classical music, multiethnic street songs, Bulgarian folk music, and Caribbean steel pan—with a special appearance by frequent Festival and Homegrown artist Christylez Bacon. Find links to the schedule and the streams, as well as information on the performers, in this post!
Welcome to the latest post in the Homegrown Plus series, featuring Susana Behar, one of the leading voices in Sephardic Song, with a hand-picked ensemble of accompanists. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with Susana, and connections to Library of Congress collections. Susana Behar was born in Havana to a Cuban family with roots in the Sephardic community of Turkey. From an early age, she was immersed in the traditional music of her homeland as well as the evocative kantikas in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) passed down by her grandparents. In 1965 she emigrated to Venezuela, where she started to explore and perform the music of her adoptive country as well as Latin American and Jewish folk music. She earned a degree in biology from the Universidad Central de Venezuela before moving to Miami, where she has lived and performed ever since. In the concert, she performs Sephardic, Cuban, and Venzuelan songs, joined by Michel Gonzalez on guitar, Adolfo Herrera on percussion, and Saul Vera on mandolin and bandola llana. In the interview, she tells us about her life in Cuba, the trauma of her family’s departure, and her life in Venezuela and the United States, with an emphasis on the intersection of her Latin American and Jewish heritage.
This post premieres the film, Bayous, Buddha, and Padaek: Southern Louisiana's Lao Foodways, by filmmakers Phanat Xanamane, Sami "Sai" Haggood, and Ba Bader who received a 2022 Community Collections Grant from the Center. The film is a captivating two-part documentary that delves into the rich culinary traditions of the Lao Buddhist immigrant community in Louisiana. This year's American Folklife Center's Homegrown Foodways Film Series celebrates Community Collections Grant recipients.
The latest post in the Homegrown Plus series features Ensemble Sangineto, one of the most popular groups on the Italian folk scene. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections. The ensemble Sangineto is comprised of three talented singers and instrumentalists. Adriano and Caterina Sangineto are twins -- Adriano plays Celtic harp and Caterina plays bowed psaltery. Jacopo Ventura rounds out the trio on guitar. The group sings in three-part harmony, with Caterina's clear voice taking the lead. The Sanginetos are children of a world-renowned luthier who has spent years crafting instruments for some of the leading folk and early music performers, so their childhood was spent meeting and listening to such musicians as Derek Bell of the Chieftains and Alan Stivell, a foundational artist of the Breton music revival. Ventura is a conservatory trained classical guitarist who has branched out to play many of the stringed instruments common in European and Asian folk music. Their concert takes you on a trip through Italy via a traditional song from each region, with medieval, Celtic, jazz, and contemporary stylings among others, thrown in for good measure.
In the interview, we learn about their lives and the world of Italian folk music.
This post presents several folktales from the Bahamas focusing on the adventures of the tricky, resourceful folktale hero Jack. We’ll see Jack escaping from the giants by charming them with his musical instrument and witness his courtship with the Devil’s daughter, Greenleaf. Like most Bahamian folktales, these stories contain complex wordplay and have songs embedded in the tales. The two tales here are very distinctively part of the Jack tale tradition, which must have been brought to the Bahamas with English settlers, but they also have African and other elements springing from their complex Caribbean roots. They were recorded by Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in 1935.
The latest post in the Homegrown Plus series features Boots Lupenui and the Kohala Mountain Boys performing heritage songs of the Kohala region of the Big Island of Hawai’i. Led by Boots Lupenui, the Kohala Mountain Boys are committed to uncovering and preserving musical treasures that helped to define the moku of Kohala on Hawai'i Island. In Boots's words, "Old-time Kohala music is soulful, playful, poetic and fierce, the manifold voice of a vibrant and extraordinary people. We want to recover and share the heirloom songs currently known only to a few isolated and precious old voices, their words and tunes unsung for years. The ancient musical essence of our beloved and mystical Kohala may be lost in this generation. Reclaiming our heirloom songs strengthens our ancestral ties to our homeland. It is a source of pride that can be shared by all the families and all the people of Kohala, for generations to come." Lupenui and his team were the recipients of a Community Collections Grant to document songs written by Kohala residents which might otherwise be lost; the collection is online at the Library of Congress website. This concert provides another way to experience these songs. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections, as well as Boots's finished documentary film about documenting the heirloom songs of Kohala.
