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Posted by: Stephen Winick
This guest blog post by Matthew Barton about the playwright Arthur Miller is part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. It was written soon after Miller’s death in 2005 for the publication Folklife Center News. Matthew Barton worked at the …
Posted in: Hidden Folklorists, Radio
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The Homegrown 2019 Concert Series is underway! All the concerts are free, noontime concerts in the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building. Tickets are not required. This year's series features Tuvan, Irish, Gospel, Blues, Balkan, and lots of African music! As always, you can find the series listed in several places on the Library's website, including the daily event listings. One handy spot listing the whole series is the Folklife Concerts page at http://www.loc.gov/concerts/folklife/?loclr=blogflt
Posted in: Homegrown Concert Series
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
For some time I have been intrigued by the beautiful voices of four young men, singers in the Holloway High School Quartet, recorded by John W. Work III in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1941. To mark African American Heritage Month this year, I thought I would try to find out a little more about them. I have …
Posted in: African American History, African Americans
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!) We’re continuing the series with the The Fairfield Four, an African-American gospel quartet that has existed for more than 95 years. Best known for its performance in the …
Posted in: African American History, Homegrown Plus
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Langston Hughes is mostly remembered selectively as a “folk” and jazz poet, or author of black vernacular blues and jazz poetry. While Hughes did dedicate himself to creating and reinterpreting these genres throughout his life and career, the core of his work is actually in collecting and experimenting with folklore across spaces and media. In Harlem and abroad, Hughes operated as what scholar Daphne Lamothe calls a “native ethnographer,” adapting his work during and beyond the Harlem Renaissance across genres to the discourses of anthropology, folklore, and sociology in a mode reminiscent of that of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, civil rights activist, songwriter, and author of the local history book Black Manhattan James Weldon Johnson, choreographer Katharine Dunham, and many others. Specifically, Hughes was an ethnographer of black vernacular culture, transcribing different kinds of linguistic and musical performance and reinterpreting those transcriptions in and as his own texts.
Posted in: African American History, Hidden Folklorists
Posted by: John Fenn
This guest post is by Sarah Elizabeth Tomlinson, a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At their school’s annual Christmas performance, forty kindergarten and first-grade students in Durham, North Carolina bounced and sang along with the Library of Congress. Specifically, they performed for an audience of family and …
Posted in: Folk Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Way back when Folklife Today celebrated our 100th post, I highlighted one of Alan Lomax’s collecting triumphs, the disc numbered AFS 100. For this, our 500th post, I thought I’d do a similar story about AFS 500. This disc was also recorded by Alan Lomax, during a field trip to the Bahamas in 1935 which …
Posted in: African American History, Folk Music
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The American Folklife Center is sad to pass on the news that San Diego folk arts promoter Louis F. Curtiss has died. He passed away at home on July 8. Curtiss was a founder of the San Diego Folk Festival, the owner of Folk Arts Rare Records, and a longtime festival and concert promoter and …
Posted in: Uncategorized
Posted by: John Fenn
Peter Winne is an independent radio producer based in Connecticut. Earlier this year he released an audio documentary on PRX that explores the fascinating history of a well-known American gospel song called, “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.” Peter’s research for the program drew him into the orbit of the American Folklife Center at the …
Posted in: Radio