Here’s an intriguing piece for your weekend reading. Eula Biss has published a moving essay, relating her life in Chicago to the Ingalls family’s life on the Kansas frontier. She examines the personal politics of fear, especially as it relates to ethnicity and neighborhoods.
Thoughts?
(This piece was discovered via The Revealer, a vital source of cultural writing on religion & the press.)
“In celebration of the 2008 Florida Folk Festival, the State Archives of Florida is offering historic recordings of all the Florida Folk Festivals from 1954 through 1979 for free online listening and downloading.
Last summer, the State Archives offered a podcast of the very first recording of the Florida Folk Festival, recorded on reel-to-reel tape on May 6, 1954. The first recording features performances by local school children, representatives of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, folk singers, and opening remarks by festival director and renowned founder of the National Folk Festival, Sarah Gertrude Knott.
Now folklife fans can visit http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife/audio.cfm to download and listen to 26 years of Florida Folk Festivals, most of them in their entirety, totaling hundreds of hours of audio.” Full story here.
The e-mail below (used with permission), from Jennifer Cutting, appeared on the Society for Ethnomusicology discussion list. The book review she highlights is available here. The book Lost Delta Found is available in Henderson Library, on the 2nd floor at F 347 .C7 W67 2005.
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Hi, Folks,
Just a heads-up about an important review of the 2005 book _Lost Delta Found_ that has just appeared in the current (but dated Summer, 2007) issue of _Western Folklore_. The author of the review is Matt Barton, who worked for Alan Lomax in the 1980s, later contributing to many of the CDs in Rounder’s Alan Lomax Collection series. More recently, he has been employed at the American Folklife Center and Recorded Sound Divisions of the Library of Congress.
Just to recap, here’s some info on the book: _Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. By John Wesley Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr._ Edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 343, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, musical notation, maps, appendices, notes, indices. $34.95 cloth.
The book presents important writings from an uncompleted project, launched on the eve of the second World War, to document the African American folk culture of an entire county, Coahoma, in the Mississippi Delta. The project was a collaboration between the pioneering African American college Fisk University and the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folksong. The surviving writings (previously unpublished) which are presented here, represent some of the earliest scholarship on African American folklife and folk music in the Mississippi Delta.
Editors Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov provide comtemporary commentary and analysis to accompany the original writings of the Fisk participants. Barton’s review deals with both the original writings and the editors’ presentation of them, including their controversial asessment of the role played by Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax.
Although the book has been out for awhile, Barton’s review provides a fresh (and more thoroughly researched) take on the Fisk/Library of Congress project than it has received elsewhere, which makes this review a must-read for scholars of African-American music.
P.S. – If you’re unable to put your hands on the current issue of _Western Folklore_, you can access Barton’s review by using services such as findarticles.com or highbeam.com
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Jennifer A. Cutting, Folklife Specialist (Reference)
Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, D.C. 20540-4610
vox: (202) 707-1731 (personal desk)
(202) 707-5510 (reference desk)
fax: (202) 707-2076
email: jcut@loc.gov
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“A nation creates music — the composer only
arranges it.”
Bela Bartok
