FOLKLIFECENTER NEWS

American Folklife Center • The Library of Congress

SPRING 2003 • VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2

2 Folklife Center News

The American Folklife Centerwas created in 1976 by the U.S.Congress to “preserve and presentAmerican folklife” through pro-grams of research, documentation,archival preservation, reference ser-vice, live performance, exhibition,publication, and training. TheCenter incorporates the Archive ofFolk Culture, which was establishedin the Music Division of the Libraryof Congress in 1928 and is now oneof the largest collections of ethno-graphic material from the UnitedStates and around the world.

STAFF

AdministrationPeggy A. Bulger, Director

Doris Craig, Administrative AssistantJohn Lewis, Assistant to the Director

Michael Taft, Head, Archive of Folk CultureAcquisitions and ProgramsDavid A. Taylor, CoordinatorProcessing and Cataloging

Rosemary Graham, Processing TechnicianTodd Harvey, Processing TechnicianCatherine Hiebert Kerst, ArchivistMarcia Segal, Processing Technician

Nora Yeh, Archivist, CoordinatorPublications

James Hardin, EditorPublic Events

Theadocia Austen, CoordinatorAndrew Wallace, Coordinator

ReferenceJennifer A. Cutting, Folklife Specialist

Judith A. Gray, Folklife Specialist,Coordinator

Stephanie A. Hall, Automation SpecialistAnn Hoog, Folklife Specialist

Digital ConversionJohn Barton, Specialist

Myron Briggs, SpecialistReference ServiceTel: 202 707–5510Fax: 202 707–2076

E-mail: folklife@loc.govVeterans History Project

Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, DirectorTimothy Roberts, Administrative Officer

Peter T. Bartis, Program OfficerSarah Rouse, Program Officer

Timothy Schurtter, Program OfficerEileen Simon, Archivist

Virginia Sorkin, Program OfficerTaru Spiegel, Program Officer

Judy Ng, Processing Technician

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Congressional AppointeesKay Kaufman Shelemay, Chair,

MassachusettsMickey Hart, California

Dennis Holub, South DakotaWilliam L. Kinney Jr., South Carolina

Judith McCulloh, IllinoisMarlene Meyerson, New Mexico

Presidential AppointeesThomas Bowman,

Acting Assistant Secretary for Publicand Intergovernmental AffairsDepartment of Veterans Affairs

Fran MainellaDirector, National Park Service

Sonya E. MedinaDeputy Director of Projects

Office of the First LadyThe White HouseAurene Martin

Acting Assistant Secretary for Indian AffairsDepartment of the InteriorLibrarian Appointees

Jane Beck, Vice-chair, VermontNorma Cantú, Texas

Kojo Nnamdi, District of ColumbiaTom Rankin, North Carolina

Ex Officio MembersJames H. Billington, Librarian of

CongressLawrence M. Small, Secretary of the

Smithsonian InstitutionDana Gioia, Chairman,

National Endowment for the ArtsBruce Cole, Chairman, NationalEndowment for the Humanities

Jack Santino, President,American Folklore SocietyEllen Koskoff, President,

Society for EthnomusicologyPeggy A. Bulger, Director,

American Folklife Center

FOLKLIFE CENTER NEWS

James Hardin, EditorDavid A. Taylor, Editorial Advisor

Sheryle Shears, DesignerPeggy Pixley, Production

Folklife Center News publishes ar-ticles on the programs and activ-ities of the American Folklife Cen-ter, as well as other articles ontraditional expressive culture. It isavailable free of charge from theLibrary of Congress, AmericanFolklife Center, 101 IndependenceAvenue, S.E., Washington, D.C.20540–4610. Folklife Center Newsdoes not publish announcementsfrom other institutions or reviewsof books from publishers otherthan the Library of Congress.Readers who would like to com-ment on Center activities ornewsletter articles may addresstheir remarks to the editor.

ONLINE INFORMATIONRESOURCES

The American Folklife Center’sWeb site provides full texts ofmany publications, informationabout AFC projects, multimediapresentations of selected collec-tions, links to Web resources onethnography, and announcementsof upcoming events. The addressfor the home page is http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ An index of thesite contents is available at http://www.loc.gov/folklife/afcindex.html

The Web site for The Veter-ans History Project provides anoverview of the project, an online“kit” for participants recording oralhistories of veterans, and a briefpre-sentation of some examples ofvideo- and audio-recordings of vet-erans’ stories. The address ishttp://www. loc.gov/folklife/vets

The Folkline Information Ser-vice is now a cooperative an-nouncement program of theAmerican Folklore Society and theAmerican Folklife Center. It isavailable only on the AmericanFolklore Society’s server: www.afsnet.org. The service providestimely information on the field offolklore and folklife, includingtraining and professional oppor-tunities, and news items of nation-al interest.

EDITOR’S NOTES

Happy Birthday, Archive of FolkCulture

Anniversaries, however arbi-trary such dates may seem,invite individuals and institu-tions to take a backward glance.The Archive of Folk Culture hasan institutional history wellworth remembering and cele-brating, from the vision of itsfounders that our Americangrassroots traditions belong inthe national library to the deter-mination of its present-day cus-todians that the great audiotreasures of the past century bepreserved for future genera-tions. The archive’s history isalso a lesson in the relationshipbetween individuals and insti-

(Continued on page 15)

Cover: Robert W. Gordon, 1928.Photo by Bachrach, courtesy ofMr. and Mrs. Bert Nye

By James Hardin

In 1928, when the Librarian ofCongress, Herbert Putnam,invited Robert W. Gordon tobecome “specialist and consult-ant in the field of Folk Song andLiterature,” Gordon had alreadyconceived and launched his life-time mission to collect the entirebody of American folk music. Hecalled it a “national project withmany workers.” Gordon attend-ed Harvard University between1906 and 1917, and then left inorder to devote all his free timeto this collecting enterprise.Supporting himself throughteaching, writing, and the occa-sional grant, Gordon traveledfrom the waterfronts of Oakland

and San Francisco, California, toAsheville, North Carolina, andDarien, Georgia, collecting andrecording folksongs with hisEdison wax-cylinder machine.He wrote a monthly columnin Adventure magazine, “OldSongs That Men Have Sung,”asking readers to send in copiesof all the folksongs they couldremember. And he contactedCarl Engel, chief of the MusicDivision at the Library of Con-gress, to discuss his dream andseek institutional support.

Engel believed that Americangrassroots traditions should berepresented in the national li-brary, and wrote in The AnnualReport of the Librarian of Congressfor 1928:

There is a pressing need for the for-mation of a great centralized collec-tion of American folk-songs. Thelogical place for such a collection isthe national library of the UnitedStates. This collection should com-prise all the poems and melodiesthat have sprung from our soil orhave been transplanted here, andhave been handed down, often withmanifold changes, from generationto generation as a precious posses-sion of our folk.

Countless individuals, numerouswalks of life, several races have con-tributed to this treasure of songsand ballads. It is richer than that ofany other country. Too much of ithas remained scattered or un-recorded. The preservation of this

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The Archive of Folk Culture at 75:A National Project with Many Workers

Robert W. Gordon, first head of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress, with partof the cylinder collection and recording machinery, about 1930. Library of Congress photo

material in the remote hauntswhere it still flourishes is endan-gered by the spread of the radio andphonograph, which are divertingthe attention of the people fromtheir old heritage and are makingthem less dependent on it.

The Library of Congress is vitallyinterested in the collecting of thesefolk verses and folk melodies. Thecollecting must be done in a schol-arly manner and the collection,safeguarded against improper use,should be made freely accessible toscholars.

Robert Gordon was not thefirst to use the latest technologyto document our national tradi-tional culture, nor Carl Engel thefirst to acknowledge its impor-tance. Thomas A. Edison invent-ed the wax-cylinder recordingmachine in 1877, and it becameavailable commercially about1888. The machine facilitateddocumentary work by many pri-vate individuals, as well asthose employed by governmentagencies and public museums.These ethnographers shared acommon vision. They believedthat the history of the Americannation ought to include themany voices of its diverse popu-lation, a notion that later figured

in the creation of the AmericanFolklife Center. They believedthat sound—both song and spo-ken word—was a vital part ofthe historical, cultural record.

Harvard anthropologist JesseWalter Fewkes was the first touse the Edison cylinder machinefor ethnographic research. Fieldrecordings made on wax cylin-ders could be brought back to astudio for study, and Fewkesused Edison’s machine inMaine, in 1890, to record thesongs and stories of Pas-samaquoddy Indians. Thesewax-cylinder recordings, thefirst ethnographic recordingsextant, are in the collections ofthe Archive of Folk Culture.Between 1907 and the early1940s, Frances Densmore col-lected more than twenty-fivehundred recordings from mem-bers of forty tribes. She was oneof a number of pioneeringwomen in the field of ethno-graphic documentation (includ-ing Alice Cunningham Fletcher,Helen Heffron Roberts, andLaura Bolton) whose collectionsare now in the Archive of FolkCulture.

The Archive of Folk Culture

When the Archiveof American Folk-Song was firstestablished in theMusic Division, itwas funded fromprivate sources.P e r i o d i c d i s -agreements overh i s m e t h o d serupted betweenRobert Gordonand Library ofCongress officialsduring his tenureas head, and theprivate moneythat Carl Engelhad secured tofund Gordon’sposition eventu-ally came to anend. But the ideaof a national folkarchive had takenroot, and it wasr e v i v e d w h e nJohn A. Lomax

came to the Library in 1932.Lomax too was devoted to col-lecting American folksong, andthe decade-long association ofJohn A. Lomax and his son, Alan,with the Library of Congressestablished the documentationof traditional culture as animportant and integral activityof the institution.

Alan Lomax became the FolkArchive’s first federally fundedstaff member in 1936, and servedas “assistant in charge.” Hemade collecting expeditions forthe Library throughout theSouth, in the Midwest, and inNew England; produced a semi-nal series of documentary folkmusic albums entitled FolkMusic of the United States; con-ducted interviews with per-formers, such as Jelly Roll Mor-t o n ; a n d , o v e r t h e y e a r s ,introduced audiences in Wash-ington, D.C., and radio listenersnationwide to an array of tradi-tional artists.

An arrangement with theLibrary initiated by John A.Lomax, wherein he would “giveto the Library, in return for theuse of a recording machine, any

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Heads of theArchive of Folk Culture

Robert W. Gordon (1928–32)John A. Lomax (1932–42,

keeping the title “hon-orary curator” until hisdeath in 1948)

Alan Lomax (1937–42,with the title “assistantin charge”)

Benjamin A. Botkin (1942–45)

Duncan Emrich (1945–55,with the title “chief ofthe Folklore Section”)

Rae Korson (1956–69)Alan Jabbour (1969–74)Joseph C. Hickerson (1974–88)Alan Jabbour (1988–99), as

director of the AmericanFolklife Center

Peggy Bulger (1999–2002),as director of the Ameri-can Folklife Center

Michael Taft (2002– )

Frances Densmore with Mountain Chief of the Black-foot Tribe, Washington, D.C., early 1900s. Densmorespent fifty years collecting several thousand record-ings of Native Americans from all over the UnitedStates and British Columbia, and her extensive col-lection is housed in the Archive of Folk Culture.Library of Congress photo

records that he might obtainwith it” (Report of the Librarian ofCongress for the Fiscal Year EndingJune 30, 1933), facilitated hisown collecting activities andlaunched a documentary equip-ment-loan program that haslasted for seventy years. Usingsuccessive types of equipmentfrom the Library, as recordingtechnologies evolved fromcylinder to disc to tape, collec-tors such as Vance Randolph,Charles Todd, Robert Sonkin,Eloise Hubbard Linscott, ZoraNeale Hurston, Herbert Hal-pert, William Fenton, MelvilleHerskovits, Helen HartnessFlanders, Austin Fife, and manyothers were able to pursue theirpersonal collecting activitiesand, at the same time, contributeto the national collection. Thestrategy of lending equipmentand recording supplies to a net-work of regional collectors was

enormously productive, bothin building the collection andin creating a community offolklorists with t ies to theLibrary.

The desire to distribute theFolk Archive’s holdings forpublic and educational usesled to the creation of the Li-brary’s Recording Laboratory,which produced the firstreleases in the Folk Music ofthe United States series in1942. In the 1950s, the early 78-rpm albums were converted to33-rpm, and new LP releasesappeared through the early1980s. As new technologiesdeveloped for making fieldrecordings—wax cylinder, disc,wire, tape, and so forth—thelaboratory staff acquired ma-chines, developed exper-tise,and initiated publishing proj-ects to make available to thepublic traditional music thatwas thought at the time tohave no commercial value. Itwas also necessary for the lab-oratory to buy and maintainrecording equipment associ-ated with each succeedingtechnology. In the 1990s, CD

versions of many of these earlyrecordings, as well as new releas-es from the world music collec-tions, were produced and distrib-u t e d t h r o u g h c o o p e r a t i v eagreements with commercial re-cording companies.

The expertise developedby the Record-ing Laboratory,the equipment-

loan program, and thegrowing reputation ofthe Library of Con-gress as a repositoryfor ethnographic doc-umentation were ap-pealing to folkloristsand cultural documen-tarians working in thiscountry and in foreignlands as well. Libraryof Congress collec-tions are international

in scope, and Library officialssupported an international ac-quisition policy for the FolkArchive. A recording trip to theBahamas that Alan Lomax madein 1935, during his tenure at theLibrary, may have been the firstinstance of seeking folklife ma-terials from outside the UnitedStates. The Folk Archive nowholds material from nearlyevery region in the world.

During the 1940s and 1950s, forexample, Arthur S. Alberts maderemarkable recordings of WestAfrican music, from a dozen eth-nic groups and six different colo-nial territories, all of which hecontributed to the Library ofCongress during the tenure ofarchive head Duncan Emrich.When portions of this collectionwere made available commer-cially, they did much to counterstereotypical notions about the“Dark Continent” by presentingexamples of authentic culturalexpressions. During her longcareer, anthropologist HenriettaYurchenco has documented thetraditions of African Americanson John’s Island, South Carolina,and in Puerto Rico. She has alsoconducted fieldwork in Mexico,Guatemala, Spain, Morocco, andIreland. Like many such collec-tors of international folklifematerials, Yurchenco has madeperiodic donations to the Libraryof Congress.

The Folk Archive also re-ceived an infusion of material

Spring 2003 5

Mexican girls Josephine Gonzalez (probably at center), AuroraGonzalez, Pearl Manchaco, Lia Trujillo, and Adela Flores sing forJohn A. and Alan Lomax, San Antonio, Texas, 1934. The Lomax-es were in south Texas on a Library-sponsored trip to documentMexican American folk music. Prints and Photographs Division.Photo by Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax with guitar, in a publicityphoto, 1940. American Folklife Center

when John A. Lomax, BenjaminA. Botkin (who followed AlanLomax as head of the archive),and others associated with theFolk Archive participated inNew Deal-era programs such asthe Federal Writers’ Project.During the 1930s, hundreds offederal workers were employedin cultural projects around thecountry, including the Ex-SlaveNarrative Project and the Cali-fornia Folk Music Project. Whenthe Work Projects Administra-tion (WPA) offices finally closeddown, in response to a shiftingof emphasis to national defenseas the United States entered theSecond World War, Library ofCongress officials facilitated thetransfer of cultural materialscollected by its various agenciesto the Library.

Thus, by the 1940s, the Ar-chive of American Folk-Songhad expanded its documentaryscope to include folklore, verbalarts, and oral history. In addi-tion to his work as “assistant incharge” at the archive, AlanLomax was hosting and produc-

i n g p r o -grams fort h e C B SS c h o o l o fthe Air in New York City, andparticipating in the RockefellerFoundation-funded Radio Re-search Project at the Library ofCongress. One activity of theproject was to conduct recordedinterviews that sampled publicopinion from around the coun-try, and the day after the attackon Pearl Harbor, December 7,1941, Lomax put out a call forfolklorists to collect “man on thestreet” reactions to the event.Sixty years later, the AmericanFolklife Center followed Lo-max’s example by asking folk-lorists from across the nation todocument immediate publicreactions to the tragic events ofSeptember 11, 2001.

With national energies fo-cused on the Second World War,folklife collecting activitiesslowed, but successive FolkArchive heads continued thepolicies and practices estab-lished by the Lomaxes—lending

documentation equipment andsupplies, publishing materialsf r o m t h e c o l l e c t i o n s , a n dencouraging donations of mate-rial from this country andaround the world. Benjamin A.Botkin helped to redefine andbroaden the purview of folkloreresearch to include ethnic stud-ies and cultural traditions foundin urban settings. He alsoencouraged folklorists to be-come involved in public per-formances and presentations bytraditional artists. He is bestknown for his many popularanthologies, such as the Treasuryof American Folklore (1944) andLay My Burden Down (1945),which draws on the Folk Ar-chive’s recordings of ex-slavenarratives.

Duncan Emrich wasa n o t h e r H a r v a r d -trained folklorist andhistorian (like Robert

Gordon, John Lomax, and Ben-jamin Botkin) who advancedFolk Archive acquisition efforts.The growing reputation of thearchive following World War IIresulted in a flood of requestsfor reference information and

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Musicians of the Haha Tribe, of Tamanar, play thebendir (a tambourine-shaped drum) and the aoua-da (a long-reed flute), while Paul Bowles recordsthem, Essaouira, Morocco, August 8, 1959. PaulBowles conducted extensive fieldwork in 1959,documenting the folk and art music of Morocco,which was his adopted home. With a grant from theRockefeller Foundation, support from the Library ofCongress, and assistance from the Moroccan gov-ernment, Bowles collected examples of everymajor Moroccan musical genre, over a period of sixmonths, and donated his recordings to the Libraryof Congress. Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collec-tion. Photographer unknown

Ethnomusico log is t V ida Chenowethinterviews Taaqiyáa, her chief KaagúUsarufa music and text contributor, PapuaNew Guinea, 1967. Donations from ethnog-raphers whose international collectingeffor ts, often over a lifetime, have resultedin large collections of cultural expressionfrom many regions and cultures haveenriched the Archive of Folk culture. VidaChenoweth Collection. Photographerunknown

Spring 2003 7

services, both from private indi-viduals and from radio, motionpicture, and publishing firms.Emrich argued vigorously for alarger staff to help respond tothe many demands of acquisi-tion, processing, and reference.The Library failed to hire addi-tional staff but did name Emrichchief of a Folklore Section cre-ated within the Music Division.(The unit was abandoned afterEmrich’s departure.) Emrichdeveloped a visionary four-yearplan for acquiring recordingsfrom twelve states whose tradi-tional culture was not represent-ed in the archive, with a particu-lar interest in the narrative,in occupational culture, andin materials from urban areasand minority language groups.He also proposed document-ing traditional performers fromforeign lands, such as Asia,Africa, the Pacific, and Aus-tralia. To facilitate his plan,Emrich visited twenty-one col-

leges and univer-sities around thecountry to initi-ate a network ofuniversity-basedd o c u m e n t a r yprograms and tourge the creationof state folklorearchives.

A new genera-tion of regionalcollectors was atwork followingWo r l d Wa r I I .Wayland Handw a s w o r k i n gamong the min-ers in Butte, Mon-t a n a ; A r t h u rC a m p a , c o l l e c t i n g Hispanicsongs in New Mexico; and Thel-ma James, recording among theminority communities in Detroit.The Archive of Folk Culture prof-ited from all this effort, and col-lections eventually arrived at theLibrary, on the new documen-

tary medium oftape, from AnneGrimes (Ohiofolksongs), RayB. Browne (Ala-bama folklife),Sherman LeePompey (folk-songs and folk-lore from theOzarks), JosephS. Hall (folk-life from theSmokey Moun-tains of Ten-nessee), HarryOster (Iowa andLouisiana cul-t u r a l t r a d i -tions), and AlanJ a b b o u r ( f i d -dling traditions,f e a t u r i n g t h e

legendary Henry Reed of GlenLyn, Virginia).

In the Library’s annual reportfor 1950, halfway through histenure as head, Duncan Emrichreported that the number ofdiscs in the collection hadreached ten thousand, and thathenceforth the medium ofchoice for the documentation ofsound would be tape record-ings. Significantly, he reportedto the Librarian, Luther Evans:

It is possible to say, in 1950, thatthe pioneering phase of field col-lecting and the establishment ofArchives has come to a close andthat in the future emphasis shouldbe directed to coordinated efforts, toelimination of duplication, and tostrong encouragement for scholarsand others to use—in fairly exhaus-tive studies—the materials alreadygathered.

In 1955, when Emrich re-signed his position, his assis-tant, Rae Korson, was namedhead of the Folk Archive. Herhusband, folklorist George Kor-

Margaret O. Moody, age ninety-five, sings for AnneGrimes, Chillicothe, Ohio, September 9, 1955. Moodylearned many songs from her family, who first settled insoutheastern Ohio in the early 1800s. Anne Grimes Col-lection. Photo by James Grimes

Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, with his twelve-string guitar,in a 1940s publicity photograph. Through his connectionwith Alan Lomax, Leadbelly became known to the New YorkCity political Left and emerged as one of the stars of the folkrevival movement that began in the 1930s and lasted forseveral decades. The Folk Archive holds Leadbelly record-ings and letters he wrote to Alan Lomax. American FolklifeCenter

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son, documented songs and loreof Pennsylvania coal miners,and that work is included in thearchive today. Rae Korson hadserved as assistant and referencelibrarian to Lomax and Botkin,as well as to Emrich. In her newposition, she stressed the impor-t a n c e o f m a i n t e n a n c e a n dpreservation of the vast hold-ings that had accumulated, anemphasis that was consistentwith the policies of L. QuincyMumford, then Librarian ofCongress. She was particularlyinterested in improving refer-ence service and publishingadditional recordings from theFolk Archive. In 1963 Korsonhired Joseph C. Hickerson (totake the place of referencelibrarian Donald Leavitt) andPat Markland (to fill a new posi-tion as secretary), bringing thestaff to three. Hickerson himselfwould later become head ofwhat was by then called theArchive of Folk Song.

Alan Jabbour followedKorson as head (1969–74). He had both strongacademic credentials

and fieldwork experience, andin keeping with his own inter-ests as a folksong collector heresumed the practice of makingfield expeditions. With CarlFleischhauer, he conducted afield project in West Virginia,from 1970 to 1972, to study theexpressive traditions of theHammons family of PocahontasCounty, and this effort resultedin a boxed set of two LP record-ings (1973) consisting of music,song, storytelling, and oral his-tory. In addition, Jabbour trav-eled to various places in pursuitof important collections, and heacquired significant holdings inNative American traditionalculture, including a small collec-tion of early cylinders from thePeabody Museum of HarvardUniversity, among them JesseWalter Fewkes’s 1890 record-ings of Passamaquoddy Indians.In 1972 Jabbour also acquired alarge and important collectiondocumenting songs, ballads,and folk plays of the British Islesfrom the American folkloristJames Madison Carpenter, an

effort inspired bya letter he discov-ered in the FolkArchive from Car-p e n t e r t o A l a nLomax. The elder-ly Carpenter haddisappeared fromthe scene twentyyears earlier, butthrough the Har-vard UniversityAlumni Associa-tion Jabbour wasable to track himto his home inBooneville, Mis-sissippi, and pur-c h a s e t h e c o l -l e c t i o n f o r t h earchive.

The 1950s and1960s spawned afolksong revival inthe United Statesthat included therelease of commer-cial recordingsfrom many popu-lar performers andgroups, a prolifera-tion of coffeehouse“folksingers,” andspontaneous hoo-tenannies every-where. The FolkArchive both nour-ished and profitedfrom this renewedinterest and thenew popularity ofmusic with tradi-tional roots. Thecollections were aresource for per-formers of manysorts seeking examples of tradi-tional musical performance, andthe Folk Archive gained attentionthat brought in new collections.

In 1974 Alan Jabbour movedto the National Endowment forthe Arts to direct its newly creat-ed Folk Arts Program, andJoseph C. Hickerson becamehead of the Folk Archive. Hick-erson did much to argue the casefor the importance of document-ing and collecting material fromthe folksong revival. Folk festi-vals were enormously popularduring the 1970s, and Hickersonencouraged donations of mate-rial documenting the move-

ment. Under Hickerson’s lead-ership, special emphasis wasplaced on the organization andcataloging of the archive’s col-lections, the creation of listeningtapes to facilitate the study ofthe holdings by visiting schol-ars, and the further productionand dissemination of record-ings. Between 1974 and 1976, aspart of its American RevolutionBicentennial program, the Li-brary of Congress issued thefirst five albums in a new fif-teen-album series Folk Music ofAmerica, with a grant from theNational Endowment for theArts.

Frank Proffitt sings and plays for Anne Warner in1941, Pick Britches Valley, North Carolina. In 1938Frank and Ann Warner traveled from their home inNew York to Beech Mountain, North Carolina, for thefirst of several collecting trips. Frank Proffitt played anumber of songs for them, including “Tom Dula,” anineteenth-century local murder ballad. Twentyyears later, the Kingston Trio’s recording “Tom Doo-ley” shot to the top of the popular charts, contributingsignificantly to the 1960s folk revival. Frank WarnerCollection. Photo by Frank Warner

The American Folklife Center

During the decade precedingthe establishment of the Ameri-can Folklife Center in 1976, anumber of factors conjoined tobring about the legislation thatcreated it. In 1967 the Smithson-ian Festival of American Folklifewas held for the first time on theNational Mall, bringing a widerange of traditional artists toWashington and winning enthu-siastic congressional support.About the same time, theapproaching American Revolu-tion Bicentennial stimulated areexamination of pluralism inAmerican life. A number of ded-icated people, notably folkloristand labor historian ArchieGreen, walked the halls of Con-gress to lobby for congressionalrecognition of the importance ofregional and ethnic cultures.Many cultural specialists be-lieved the time was right for anational center devoted to thepreservation and study of folk-life.

The American Folklife Preser-vation Act, Public Law 94–201,which resulted from theseefforts, defines the term “Amer-ican folklife” as “the traditional

expressive culture shared with-in the various groups in theUnited States: familial, ethnic,occupational, religious, region-al.” It states that “the diversityinherent in American folklifehas contributed greatly to the

cultural richness of the Nationand has fostered a sense of indi-viduality and identity amongthe American people.”

The American Folklife Preser-vation Act was approved byboth houses of Congress at theend of 1975, and signed into lawby President Gerald Ford on Jan-uary 2, 1976. Initially intendedfor the Smithsonian Institution,the center was placed in theLibrary of Congress, in part tobuild upon the work of the FolkArchive already there.

The Folklife Center operatesunder the supervision of theLibrarian of Congress and aboard of trustees composed ofindividuals from private lifeappointed by the Speaker of theU.S. House of Representatives,the president pro tempore of theSenate, and the Librarian ofCongress; officials from federalagencies with cultural pro-grams, appointed by the presi-dent of the United States; and exofficio members—the Librarianof Congress, the secretary of theSmithsonian Institution, thechairs of the National Endow-ment for the Arts and theNational Endowment for theHumanities, the director of theAmerican Folklife Center, and

Spring 2003 9

William Clark with the “junkyard robots” he created from recycled automo-tive parts, Newtonville, New Jersey, 1983. Known as “Robot Man” in hishometown, Clark uses the tools and skills of his trade as automotive repair-man and the materials at hand in his shop to fashion robot sculptures andother ar tful constructions. Pinelands Folklife Project Collection. Photo byJoseph Czarneki

“Fancy dancers” participate in the Grand Entry at the 1984 Omaha TribalPowwow in Macy, Nebraska. The powwow is a social gathering that helps toensure the cultural conservation of Native American song and dance tradi-tions.The Folk Archive holds the largest collection of Native American musicdocumentation in the world, from recordings made of Passamaquoddy Indi-ans in Maine in 1890 to recordings and photographs made of several Omahapowwows held in the 1980s. Photo by Dorothy Sara Lee

10 Folklife Center News

In Wefing’s Marine Supplies store, field-worker NancyNusz (right) speaks with a local engine mechanic whilea store clerk looks on, Apalachicola, Florida, 1986.Stores such as the one shown here are often meetingplaces for members of the community and, in the caseof this marine supply store, good sources of informationabout local fishing activities, practitioners, and tradi-tions for field-workers doing research. Florida MaritimeProject. Photo by David A. Taylor

Aerial photo of the Joseph DelumeRanch, Lincoln County, Nevada. TheAmerican Folklife Center’s 1990 fieldproject Italian-Americans in the Westincluded a team of teachers and stu-dents from the University of Utah’sGraduate School of Architecture,who documented with photographsand drawings buildings constructedby Italian immigrants. Italian-Ameri-cans in the West Project Collection.Photo by Blanton Owen

Three generations of Collettes at the family-run busi-ness Collette Catering and Carry-out, March 1990. Aland Joanna Collette (shown here, right) establishedthe business as a way of involving their children intheir everyday lives, and six of their seven childrenwork in the catering service. Italian-Americans in theWest Project. Photo by David Taylor

the presidents of the Society forEthnomusicology and the Amer-ican Folklore Society.

The Folklife Center ’s en-abling legislation directs it to“preserve and present Americanfolklife” through programs ofresearch, scholarship, training,live performances, exhibits,publications, and preservation.The legislation also calls for theestablishment and maintenanceof a national archive “with anyFederal department, agency, orinstitution.” But, of course, afolk archive was near at hand,and the Archive of Folk Cul-ture was transferred from theMusic Division to the center in1978. Thus, the traditionalarchival activities of acquisi-tion, processing, preservation,and reference have remainedcentral to the mission and thedaily life of the American Folk-life Center.

In September 1976, Alan Jab-bour, who had served earlieras head of the Folk Archive,became the first director of

the American Folklife Center. In1977, the first full year of itsoperations, the center launchedtwo field documentary projects,the Chicago Ethnic Arts Projectand the South-Central GeorgiaFolklife Project, setting a pat-tern that came to characterizemuch of its early work. One proj-ect was urban and one rural, butboth emphasized the impor-tance of documenting artistictraditions professionally, usingboth sound recordings and stillphotography, with an eye bothto creating public products such

as books and exhibitions and tobuilding the collections in theFolk Archive. Teams of cen-ter field-workers sought todocument not only music butalso verbal arts, material cul-ture, and occupational tradi-tions, as well as other aspects ofculture.

The creation of the AmericanFolklife Center also engaged theU.S. Congress in the folkloreenterprise. Whereas most FolkArchive collections had resultedfrom the vision and interest ofindividuals—both private citi-zens and those working for gov-ernment agencies and large pub-lic institutions—many of thecenter ’s field documentary proj-ects were now carried out incooperation with the NationalPark Service, often at the behestof a member (or members) ofCongress. The center hasworked with the Park Service oncultural heritage surveys innorthern Maine; Lowell, Massa-chusetts; the New Jersey PineBarrens and Paterson, New Jer-sey; along the Blue Ridge Park-way in Virginia and North Car-olina; and at New River Gorge inWest Virginia.

In 1979 the Folklife Centerlaunched the Federal CylinderProject, one of its most ambi-tious undertakings. Over thedecades the Folk Archive hadreceived thousands of origi-nal, one-of-a-kind wax-cylinder

recordings of ethnographic ma-terial from field documen-tat ion conducted from 1890through the 1930s, primarily ofAmerican Indian music. TheLibrary’s Recording Laboratoryhad developed a special expert-ise in the technically challeng-ing work of copying theserecordings. In the 1930s and1940s some were copied ontodisc, and beginning in the 1960sothers were copied onto mag-netic tape. Now a commitmentwas made to copy all of the morethan ten thousand wax cylindersand cylinder-based recordingsin the archive for preservationand access. Word of the projectbrought even more cylinders tothe Library.

The Federal Cylinder Projectwas established to arrange, cata-log, and transfer to preservationtape this priceless heritage ofmusic. In addition, the projectmade cassette-tape copies of therecordings to return to the tribesof origin. This last activityexemplified a central philo-sophical tenet of the Folk Ar-chive and of many ethnographicarchives throughout the UnitedState, that the documentarymaterials ultimately belong tothe communities of origin. Formany years representatives ofAmerican Indian tribes havevisited the American FolklifeCenter to use the collections fortheir own programs of cultural

Spring 2003 11

Federal Cylinder Project soundtechnician and folklorist ErikaBrady, in the Recording Laboratoryof the Library of Congress (circa1980), makes a copy of a wax-cylin-der recording using a reel-to-reeltape machine. By the early 1970s itwas clear that time was taking itstoll on the Library’s cylinder record-ings and preservation duplicationwas urgent. Renewed interest onthe part of American Indian tribes intheir own cultural heritage height-ened the need to preserve and cat-alog this extensive collection.American Folklife Center photo byCarl Fleischhauer

preservation and revitaliza-tion.

Since the Folklife Center ’sestablishment in 1976, the FolkArchive has grown dramatical-ly, both from the field documen-tation initiatives undertaken bythe center itself and from theacquisition of major collections.By 1981 the archive was official-ly named the Archive of FolkCulture to reflect the breadth ofits collections. In July 1999Peggy A. Bulger succeeded AlanJabbour as director of the Amer-ican Folklife Center. In October1999 the center was granted per-

manent authorization bythe U.S. Congress. In2002 Michael Taft wasappointed head of theFolk Archive.

Today, the archivecontains morethan 3 millionitems and is truly

the national folk archiveof the United States. Inkeeping with the multi-cultural character ofAmerican society andthe international scopeof the Library of Con-gress, its holdings alsoencompass folklife ma-terials from around theworld. Yet many items inthis storehouse of infor-mation are imperiledbecause of the fragilenature of sound record-ings. In urgent need ofpreservation are thou-sands of original audiorecordings made overthe course of the twenti-eth century by folk-lorists, ethnomusicolo-gists, anthropologists,and other ethnogra-phers, on wax cylinder,wire, aluminum disc,acetate, audiotape, andvideotape. Many, in-cluding those from the

past several decades, requireimmediate conservation treat-ment and copying to other for-mats. Also in need of preserva-tion are scores of photographs,drawings, diagrams, maps, andfield notes that complement andprovide interpretive informa-tion on the recordings.

In July 2000 a joint projectproposal by the American Folk-life Center in the Library of Con-gress and the Center for Folklifeand Cultural Heritage of theSmithsonian Institution wasawarded a grant for $750,000 topreserve the historic soundrecordings housed at the twoinstitutions. The White HouseMillennium Council’s preserva-tion program Save America’sTreasures, in partnership withthe National Park Service andthe National Trust for HistoricPreservation, made the grant.

Among its several aims, theSave Our Sounds audio preser-vation project, as it came to becalled, serves as a model and isbuilding expertise at the Ameri-can Folklife Center that can thenbe shared with others. All ethno-graphic collections will have toface the inevitable deteriorationof their sound recordings, andall will need standards andguidelines for preservation. Ifthe last hundred years have beena time of great accumulation of

12 Folklife Center News

The American Folklife Center’s Save OurSounds project is preserving as digital filesmany thousands of endangered audio record-ings, made in different formats, from the1890s to the present. In this photo PeterAlyea, digital conversion specialist and soundengineer in the Library’s Motion Picture,Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division,transfers the sound from a disc recording to adigital file. Photo by James Hardin, February2003.

Jackie Torrence, a former referencelibrarian from High Point, North Caroli-na, now a professional storyteller, at the1986 National Storytelling Festival,Jonesborough, Tennessee. Internation-al Storytelling Collection. Photo by TomRaymond.

recorded sound, then the twen-ty-first century promises to be atime of major preservation ofsound recordings to ensure thatthey remain accessible.

The American Folklife Centeris a small agency with a verylarge mission. The Library ofCongress provides essentialinstitutional support, of course,

but to extend its reach the centerengages in cooperative agree-ments with other public and pri-vate organizations, such asthose with the National ParkService for field documentationprojects and others with com-mercial firms for various printand music recording publica-tion projects. For example, the

center has a cooperativearrangement with the Interna-tional Storytelling Foundationof Jonesborough, Tennessee, tocollect, preserve, and dissemi-nate information about story-telling. The center has likewiseacquired thousands of hours ofaudio and video recordings,photographs, manuscripts, andpublications from the NationalStorytelling Festival. Throughan innovative arrangement withthe National Council for the Tra-ditional Arts, based in SilverSpring, Maryland, the center isacquiring a vast collection offive thousand hours of record-ings from the National Folk Fes-tival and other events.

In November 2000 the Ameri-can Folklife Center launched theVeterans History Project, whichwas authorized by Public Law106–380. Approved by PresidentBill Clinton on October 27, 2000,the Veterans History Project isdesigned to collect and preservethe personal stories of Ameri-ca’s war veterans and to makeselections from these storiesavailable on the Internet. Thisimmense project has beenundertaken with the coopera-tion and participation of manyproject partners, including themilitary service organizationsand numerous individual vol-unteers, and is supported by amajor grant from AARP.

Thus does the American Folk-life Center find itself newlyengaged in its mission “to pre-serve and present Americanfolklife” in the new millennium,as it continues to fulfill thedream of the Folk Archive’s firstinspired collector, Robert W.Gordon, who sought to gathertogether in a national archive allour songs and stories, a greattask he regarded as “a nationalproject with many workers.”

Spring 2003 13

Veterans History Project assistantMandy Brown sorts and arranges mate-rials sent to the Library of Congress thatdocument the experiences of America’swar veterans. Photo by James Hardin

Mingo Saldivar plays tejano conjuntomusic on the Library of Congress’sNeptune Plaza, part of the AmericanFolklife Center’s Homegrown 2002concert series, September 19, 2002.Photo by David Taylor

By James Hardin

“It all started innocently enoughin a childhood encounter,”writes Mickey Hart in his newbook Songcatchers: In Search ofthe World’s Music, with K.M.Kostyal (Washington, D.C.: Na-tional Geographic, 2003). A rec-ording of African pygmies hediscovered in his parents’ rec-ord collection opened for him anew world of musical possibili-ties and, as he says, “lit myimagination with an intensitythat would ultimately guide mylife.”

Mickey Hart took up thedrums, played with a band dur-ing a tour of duty with the U.S.Air Force, and eventually foundhimself in 1960s San Franciscowith a band called the GratefulDead. He had his first experi-ence attempting to documentthe sounds of others when bandcolleague Bob Weir suggestedthat they make a night-timeexpedition to the San Franciscozoo to record the animals. With aborrowed Nagra tape recorder,the two attempted to sneakthrough the front gate, but

found themselves tangled inmicrophone cable and thwartedin their documentary effortswhen their panicked commotionalerted the zoo guards.

The late sixties was a timeof social and culturalexperimentation, andHart’s musical imagina-

tion was open to a range of influ-ences and possibilities, his“antenna scanning for newsounds.” He met and recordedIndian musicians in San Francis-co. On a 1978 trip to Egypt for aGrateful Dead concert at the footof the Great Pyramids, he trav-eled to Aswan to record themusic of those who navigate theNile in their feluccas. In 1985 hemet the Gyuto Tantric Choir at aconcert in Amherst, Massachu-setts, and invited them to Cali-fornia to perform and record. In1988, on a cultural expedition ofanother sort, Hart arranged torecord a concert of the SanQuentin prison choir.

“Songcatching is not easy,”says Mickey Hart. “It takesartists who create music,” andlisteners who appreciate it. “It

takes technology to record andpreserve it. And it takesrecordists who are willing totravel, sometimes to the remotecorners of the earth.”

Songcatchers pays tribute tothe many men and women whohave devoted their lives torecording and preserving theinfinitely diverse rhythms andsounds that make up the world’smusic. The book traces audiodocumentation from the inven-tion of the cylinder recordingmachine by Thomas Alva Edisonin 1877 and the first ethnograph-ic field use of the machine, byJesse Walter Fewkes, to docu-ment Passamaquoddy Indiansin Maine in 1890. It offers hom-age to Prussian-born FranzBoas, who settled in America in1887, and his protégé at Colum-bia University, George Herzog,the fathers of American anthro-pology and ethnomusicology. Ittells of Alice CunninghamFletcher giving up a comfortablelife to live on the Nebraskaprairie to document OmahaIndian music, with the help ofFrancis La Flesche, the son of anOmaha chief. It profiles the

14 Folklife Center News

Mickey Hart (right) with two fellow percussionists, Tito Puente and Giovanni Hidalgo, at the Library ofCongress for its Bicentennial celebration concert, June 1, 2000. Photo by James Hardin

Mickey Hart in Search of the World’s Music

indefatigable Frances Dens-more, from Red Wing, Minneso-ta, who spent fifty years collect-ing several thousand recordingsof Native Americans from allover the United States andBritish Columbia.

Songcatchers also profiles thework of collectors working out-side the United States, such asthe Hungarians Zoltán Kodályand Béla Bartók, the AustralianPercy Grainger, and the Englishteam of Cecil Sharp and MaudKarpeles; as well as AmericansLaura Boulton, Paul Bowles,Margaret Mead, and HenriettaYurchenco.

Many of the collectionsof American song-catchers have foundtheir way to the

Archive of Folk Culture at theLibrary of Congress, and Hartand Kostyal pay tribute to therole that several institutionshave played in supporting docu-mentary expeditions and hous-ing and preserving the resultingmaterials—from Berlin’s Pho-nogramm-Archiv and NewYork’s Museum of Natural His-tory to the Bureau of AmericanEthnography at the SmithsonianInstitution and the AmericanFolklife Center.

In a chapter titled “Folksay,”Hart and Kostyal describe thenext step that songcatchers havetaken in the process of collectingand archiving the world’smusics: publication. From 1932to 1942, John A. Lomax and hisson, Alan, headed the Archive ofAmerican Folk-Song, which wasestablished at the Library ofCongress in 1928. Both devotedtheir lives to collecting songsand making them availablethrough concerts, books, radio,and published recordings. In1942 Alan Lomax launched theLibrary of Congress LP-record-ings series Folk Music of theUnited States. Lomax fearedthat modern life was “sweepingcompletely off the globe whatunspoiled folklore is left,”replacing it with “just one typeof diet and one available kind ofmusic.” Moses Asch, a Polishimmigrant to New York in 1910,had a similar view. Inspired as a

young man by John Lomax’sCowboy Songs and Other Ballads(1910), Asch founded Folk-ways Records, which broughtout “countless groundbreak-ing records” of folk and eth-nic music, featuring WoodieGuthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger,Mary Lou Williams, Josh White,Sonny Terry, Bess Hawes, andmany others.

When Folkways Records wastransferred to the SmithsonianInstitution, Tony Seeger invitedMickey Hart to serve on theboard of directors for Smithson-ian Folkways. Smithsonian eth-nomusicologist Tom Vennumadvised Hart that he should visitthe Library of Congress toexplore the riches of the Archiveof Folk Culture. As a result of thevisit, Hart eventually produceda series of six CDs called TheEndangered Music Project, withformer American Folklife Cen-ter director Alan Jabbour. Hartnow serves as a trustee of theCenter and chairs the Leader-ship Committee to support theAmerican Folklife Center/Smith-sonian Institution joint audiopreservation project, Save OurSounds. In addition, he serves onthe National Recorded SoundPreservation Board at the Libraryof Congress.

In telling the story of theextraordinary men andwomen who carried cylin-der, disc, tape, and all man-

ner of recording devicesthroughout the United Statesand the world to capture thefleeting sounds of musical tra-ditions from many culturalgroups, Hart also tells the storyof the Archive of Folk Culture,the national repository of grass-roots cultural tradition, now cel-ebrating its seventy-fifth birth-day.

The twentieth century was agreat period for the documenta-tion of traditional music, and atthe start of the twenty-first it isthe responsibility of archivesand libraries to find ways to pre-serve a great legacy of recordedsound. Richly illustrated withhistoric photographs, Song-catchers: In Search of the World’sMusic tells the story of those

efforts to ensure that the infinitevariety of the world’s musicaltraditions will be available toenrich human experience forgenerations to come.

EDITOR’S NOTES from page 2

tions, as chronicled in this issueof Folklife Center News, and theway in which motives and mis-sions may either conflict or coin-cide.

A review of the history andcontents the Folk Archive alsoreveals and reflects a time ofextraordinary change that spansthe twentieth century, from thefirst cylinder recordings thatmade audio documentation pos-sible to the latest technologiesfor publication and preserva-tion. The period has witnessedthe social and cultural disrup-tions of many forces and events,including two world wars andthe Great Depression.

For Further Reading

“The Archive of Folk Cultureat 75” is adapted from “TheAmerican Folklife Center: AnIllustrated Guide,” by JamesHardin, Library of Congress,forthcoming. Debora Kodish’sGood Friends and Bad Enemies:Robert Winslow Gordon and theStudy of American Folksong(Urbana and Chicago: Univer-sity of Illinois Press, 1986) is anexcellent account of an impor-tant (but little known) figure inthe history of American folklorestudies. Peter Bartis’s “A Histo-ry of the Archive of Folk Song atthe Library of Congress: TheFirst Fifty Years” (Ph.D. diss.,University of Pennsylvania,1982) chronicles the tenures ofthe men and women who builtthe Folk Archive. Alan Jabbour ’s“The American Folklife Center:A Twenty-Year Retrospective”(Folklife Center News 18: 1–2,winter–spring 1996, part 1;18:3–4, summer–fall 1996, part2) offers a lucid and insightfulhistory of the Center.

Spring 2003 15

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Carrie B. Grover, Gorham, Maine, 1943. The Eloise Hubbard Linscott Collection of NewEngland folksongs and folklore comprises the life’s work of an amateur collector devot-ed to the preservation of the traditional music of her region. The collection includes theperformances of several New England fiddlers, including Carrie B. Grover, the onlywoman among them. The Linscott Collection is one of more than three thousand col-lections in the Archive of Folk Culture, which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary thisyear. Photo probably by Eliose Hubbard Linscott

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