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Posted by: John Fenn
This guest post by Joe Z. Johnson, one of the American Folklife Center's 2023 Folklife Interns, announces a new research guide focused on African American banjo players by sharing the motivation behind the guide and highlighting some of the content.
Posted in: AFC History, African American History, African American History Month
Posted by: Guha Shankar
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress welcomes three new Presidential appointees to the Center’s Board of Trustees: Sara C. Bronin, Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), Admiral Rachel Leland Levine, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Charles Sams III, Director of the National Park Service. Each appointee …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Ali Doğan Gönültas and Friends. This is one of our prerecorded video concerts, shot on video in Istanbul and presented here for the first time! As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore! Ali Doğan Gönültas is a Kurdish musician born in Turkey. Ali's oral history and field research, which he began in 2007, led him to record and release the 2022 album “Kiğı," and to record this concert. Kiğı is a personal look at the 150-year musical process of the village of Kiğı, Ali's birthplace. It consists of works in the regional languages of Kurmancî, Kırdaskî, Armenian and Turkish, as well as Zazakî, Ali's mother tongue. Themes and styles such as govend (traditional Kurdish dance), laments, work songs, and prayer forms are conveyed with the modal characteristics of the region.
Posted in: Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus, Homegrown Premieres
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Back in February, we were delighted to host the first Homegrown concert of 2023 here at the Library of Congress. The concert was a solo performance by the banjo player, fiddler, and singer Jake Blount, an award-winning musician and a scholar of African American musical traditions. We presented Jake as part of Live! at the Library, the series featuring extended visiting hours and special programming every Thursday night. It was also part of the Black History Month celebrations at the Library of Congress and was presented in cooperation with the Folklore Society of Greater Washington. Like other blogs in the Homegrown Plus series, this one includes a concert video and a video interview with the featured performer (in this case Jake Blount), plus links and connections to Library of Congress collections.
Posted in: AFC Events, African American History, Concerts with Archive Challenge Content, Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus
Posted by: Stephen Winick
For many years, the song "Booth" or "Booth Killed Lincoln" has been considered a prime example of a traditional ballad about a historical event. Telling in remarkable detail the story of John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, the ballad seems ripped from contemporary headlines. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who sang the song for the Library of Congress in 1949, has been credited as the song's collector, and many sources indicate a date of about 1890 as the latest possible origin for the song, since Lunsford said he heard his father sing "some of the stanzas" to the fiddle tune "Booth." But is there another possible explanation of the song's origins? In this post, we'll look more closely at Lunsford's various recordings of "Booth," as well as unpublished primary-source and secondary-source evidence in the AFC archive, to try to piece together the birth of "Booth."
Posted in: Caught My Eye, Folk Music, Folksong
Posted by: Lisa Taylor
The following is a guest blog post by Andrew Huber, a liaison specialist for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project (VHP). The idea of an event focusing on collecting stories from Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) veterans all stemmed from a simple question asked during a VHP workshop in 2020. I was teaching …
Posted in: Asian American History, Asian Americans, Chinese Americans, Cultural Heritage, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Narratives, Oral History, Pacific Islander History, Pacific Islands Americans, Storytelling, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This blog post details a visit by members of the the Swedish Women's Education Association of DC (SWEA DC) to the Library of Congress. Curators from the European Reading Room, the Manuscript Division, and the American Folklife Center presented treasures related to Swedish and Swedish American history, literature and folklore. In the post you can read more about these treasures, and follow links to view many of them for yourself.
Posted in: AFC History, Swedish Americans
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Welcome back to Homegrown Plus! We're continuing the series with Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin, a duo that has been at the forefront of old-time string music and other folk styles for decades. Like other blogs in the Homegrown Plus series, this one includes a concert video and a video interview with the featured performers, plus links and connections to Library of Congress collections. Kate Brislin is a specialist in singing with others, a peerless blender. She was a founding member of the all female Any Old Time String Band in the 1970s. Tone and rhythm are paramount in the way she plays five-string banjo and guitar. Jody Stecher has been a soloist, a band member, an amateur folklorist, a record producer, an unusually enabling teacher, and an individualistic multi-instrumentalist and singer. In recent years he has been dreaming and composing new songs and tunes that sound old.
Posted in: Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus
Posted by: Stephen Winick
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus series with Bennett Konesni, who performs work songs in the context of both farm work and maritime pursuits in his home state of Maine. Like other blogs in the Homegrown Plus series, this one includes a concert video and a video interview with the featured performer, plus links and connections to Library of Congress collections. Bennett Konesni is a singer, farmer, musician and administrator, based where he grew up in midcoast Maine, and also at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, NY, where parts of his family have lived since 1652. He has been singing work songs while working since he was a teenager on schooners in Penobscot Bay. At Middlebury College, he wrote a thesis based on research into Zulu work song traditions done while studying abroad in South Africa and involving a workshop at the Middlebury College Farm in 2004—one of the first work song workshops on an American farm. After graduating, Bennett studied musical labor on three continents thanks to a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship: musical fishing in Ghana and Holland, singing and dancing farmers in Tanzania, and livestock songs in Mongolia and Switzerland. Since 2007, Bennett has been using work songs at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm.
Posted in: AFC Events, Concerts with Archive Challenge Content, Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus