Top of page
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The American Folklife Center is very grateful to April Rodriguez, one of this year’s 36 Library of Congress Junior Fellow Summer Interns. April has been working with Alan Lomax’s choreometrics materials, a lesser-known but crucial aspect of his research. Her work has revealed aspects of the collection our own staff didn’t know about, and will …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Dance, Folklorists, Internship program
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post from Lotus Norton-Wisla, an intern at the American Folklife Center working to improve access to materials in the Alan Lomax Collection related to choreometrics, which was Lomax’s methodology for studying dance performance style. These materials consist of more than 70 boxes of paper materials and more than 3,500 film elements. …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Archival Practice, Dance
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post by Joshua Caffery, who was the John W. Kluge Center’s Alan Lomax Fellow until April 2014. Caffery is a scholar of vernacular traditions in Louisiana, as well as an archivist and a musician. He is the author of Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings, and the …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series, Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus, Folk Music, Folksong, French American History, John Lomax, Louisiana
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
The following is a guest post from Todd Harvey, the curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center archives, Library of Congress. The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce donation of the Bess Lomax Hawes Collection (AFC 2014/008) to the Center’s archive. The collection contains manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, and moving …
Posted in: Bess Lomax Hawes
Posted by: Stephen Winick
We continue our exploration of Jack tales with a fascinating story recorded in the Bahamas in 1935: "Jack Rescues the Princess from the Tiger." The story was told to Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle by Alexander Finderson and a group of his neighbors in Andros Island. The tale involves a princess who is abducted by a tiger and forced to marry him, until Jack comes along to rescue her. In addition to presenting audio and a transcription of the tale, we'll look at some of this story's connections to other folktales. Interestingly, it seems to have roots in a story that is widespread in India, but also has connections to Bre'r Rabbit tales from South Carolina. The post also presents striking photos of a man we believe might be the storyteller.
Posted in: Bahamas Jack Tales, Jack Tale History, Jack Tale Texts, Jack Tales
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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.
Posted in: African American History, Bahamas Jack Tales, Caribbean Americans, Jack Tale History, Jack Tale Texts, Jack Tales, Narratives, Storytelling
Posted by: Stephen Winick
We're back with another entry in the Botkin Plus series AND another episode of the Folklife Today podcast! In this entry, we'll provide the video of a Botkin Lecture and a podcast interview, both of them featuring Cormac Ó hAodha. Cormac is the most recent Lovelace Fellow (aka Lomax Scholar) at the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center. That's a fellowship established within the Kluge Center especially for the study of the Alan Lomax collection, one of the American Folklife Center's signature collections. Cormac comes from the village of Cúil Aodha in the Múscraí Gaeltacht of Co. Cork in Ireland, a recognized heartland of the Irish language and traditional Irish-language singing. He is conducting in-depth research on the material Lomax collected some 73 years ago from singers in the Múscraí singing tradition, the same singing tradition Cormac grew up in and is a part of. Some of the people recorded by Lomax are Cormac's relatives, and his research seeks to illuminate their songs, their language, and their traditions. Follow the link to the post, the video, and the podcast!
Posted in: AFC Events, Alan Lomax, Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series, Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus, Celtic Music, Irish American History, Podcasts
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In or about 1942, Alan Lomax sketched out a draft or proposal for a children's picture book, "The Story of the Mighty Blue Goose." The book, which Lomax planned to have fully illustrated by an artist, was to be based on "The Grey Goose," a song he had recorded for the archive alongside his father in 1934. Lomax credited the singer as the book’s main author: “Iron Head” Baker, a Texas prison inmate and trusty who sang about 60 songs for the Lomaxes. In 1936, Baker was paroled and spent three months collecting songs across the South with John A. Lomax, returning to prison in 1937. Like many of Alan Lomax’s projects, the book appears to have been interrupted by World War II and his departure from the Library of Congress. This is a shame, because Lomax was clearly onto something. "The Story of the Mighty Blue Goose" would have been inspirational on several levels. An homage to African American culture credited to a Black man and his white assistants, it would have been an inspiring children's book and a significant accomplishment in the legacies of the Lomaxes and of Iron Head Baker.
Posted in: AFC History, African American History, Alan Lomax, Caught My Eye, Folksong, John Lomax
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This post looks at photos and recordings of some important calypso stars of the 1940s New York music scene, Macbeth the Great (Patrick MacDonald), Duke of Iron (Cecil Anderson) and Lord Invader (Rupert Grant). The 1947 photos are part of the William P. Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress Music Division, while the recording of a full-length 1946 concert by the three performers is part of the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax Collection. These collections shed light on an interesting time in American music, before the emergence of rock and roll, when calypso and related Caribbean styles were vying for popularity with other folk music genres. In 1944, the Andrews Sisters had a major hit with Lord Invader's "Rum and Coca-Cola." In 1956, Harry Belafonte's "Calypso" became the first million-selling LP record. During the period between those milestones, it looked possible that calypso could emerge to be one of the leading styles of American pop music. Performers like Duke of Iron, Macbeth, and Lord Invader engaged in friendly competitions like the ones documented by Gottlieb and Lomax, using witty lyrics, catchy music, and personal charisma to fascinate audiences on stage and on record. Find the photos and a link to the concert audio in this blog post.
Posted in: African American History, Caribbean Americans, Caught My Eye, Folk Music, Folksong, Photographs