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The Archive of Folk Culture was established in 1928 as the first national collection of American folk music in the United States of America. It was initially part of the Music Division of the Library of Congress and now resides in the American Folklife Center.
Alan Jabbour was an American musician and folklorist, and the founding director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Jean Ruth Ritchie was an American folk singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player, called by some the "Mother of Folk". In her youth she learned hundreds of folk songs in the traditional way, many of which were Appalachian variants of centuries old British and Irish songs, including dozens of Child Ballads. In adulthood, she shared these songs with wide audiences, as well as writing some of her own songs using traditional foundations.
"Matty Groves", also known as "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" or "Little Musgrave", is a ballad probably originating in Northern England that describes an adulterous tryst between a young man and a noblewoman that is ended when the woman's husband discovers and kills them. It is listed as Child ballad number 81 and number 52 in the Roud Folk Song Index. This song exists in many textual variants and has several variant names. The song dates to at least 1613, and under the title Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard is one of the Child ballads collected by 19th-century American scholar Francis James Child.
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking". NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
"Hesitation Blues" is a popular song adapted from a traditional tune. One version was published by Billy Smythe, Scott Middleton, and Art Gillham. Another was published by W.C. Handy as "Hesitating Blues". Because the tune is traditional, many artists have taken credit as writer, frequently adapting the lyrics of one of the two published versions. Adaptations of the lyrics vary widely, though typically the refrain is recognizably consistent. The song is a jug band standard and is also played as blues and sometimes as Western swing. It is cataloged as Roud Folk Song Index No. 11765. Composer William Grant Still arranged a version of the song in 1916 while working with Handy.
Adell Hall Ward, better known as Vera Hall was an American folk singer, born in Livingston, Alabama. Best known for her 1937 song "Trouble So Hard", she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2005.
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadside Index and a "field-recording index" compiled by Roud. It subsumes all the previous printed sources known to Francis James Child and includes recordings from 1900 to 1975. Until early 2006, the index was available by a CD subscription; now it can be found online on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website, maintained by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). A partial list is also available at List of folk songs by Roud number.
"Cindy" is a popular American folk song. According to John Lomax, the song originated in North Carolina. In the early and middle 20th century, "Cindy" was included in the songbooks used in many elementary school music programs as an example of folk music. One of the earliest versions of "Cindy" is found in Anne Virginia Culbertson's collection of Negro folktales where one of her characters, Tim, "sang a plantation song named 'Cindy Ann'," the first verse and refrain of which are:
Mary Helen Creighton, CM was a prominent Canadian folklorist. She collected over 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and beliefs in a career that spanned several decades, and she published many books and articles on Nova Scotia folk songs and folklore. She received numerous honorary degrees for her work and was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1976.
Helen Hartness Flanders, a native of the U.S. state of Vermont, was an internationally recognized ballad collector and an authority on the folk music found in New England and the British Isles. At the initiative of the Vermont Commission on Country Life, Flanders commenced a three-decade career capturing traditional songs that were sung in New England—songs that, in many cases, traced their origin to the British Isles. The timing of her life work was critical, coming as it did when people were turning away from traditional music in favor of listening to the radio. Today her nearly 4,500 field recordings, transcriptions and analyses are housed at the Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont and have been a resource for scholars and folk singers, since the establishment of the collection in 1941.
Robert Winslow Gordon was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs.
Margaret Crowl MacArthur was an American singer and player of the MacArthur Harp and lap dulcimer.
Jim Garland was a miner, songwriter, folksinger, and folk song collector from the coal mining country of eastern Kentucky, where he was involved with the communist-led National Miners Union (NMU) during the violent labor conflicts of the early 1930s called the Harlan County War.
"Boil Them Cabbage Down" is an American folk song. Hoecakes are small cornmeal cakes that were baked over a fire on the blade of a hoe. A breakfast of hoecakes and cabbage soup testifies to the humble origins of this song. According to Alan Lomax, musicologist and folklorist formerly of the Library of Congress, this tune was originally associated with African slaves brought from Niger.
The folk music standard I'm going to the West is also known by the title Going to the West. It was collected by Alabama professor Byron Arnold from Janie Barnard Couch of Guntersville, Alabama in June or July 1947, and published in an Alabama songbook in 1950.
Kenneth S. Goldstein was an American folklorist, educator and record producer and a "prime mover" in the American Folk Music Revival.
Ruby Pickens Tartt was an American folklorist, writer, and painter who is known for her work helping to preserve Southern black culture by collecting the life histories, stories, lore, and songs of former slaves for the Works Progress Administration and the Library of Congress. In 1980 she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.
Eloise Hubbard Linscott was a 20th-century American folklorist, song collector, and preservationist. She is the author of Folk Songs of Old New England (1939), considered a valuable scholarly source for American folk songs. John Lee Brooks described Folk Songs of Old New England as an American equivalent of Bishop Percy's 1765 work Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
Judith McCulloh was an American folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and university press editor.
References
- ↑ "A History of the Department of Music by Tom Garner circa 1944". Archived from the original on 2015-09-10. Retrieved 2015-08-20.
- 1 2 Bullfrog Jumped: Children's Folksongs from the Byron Arnold Collection Allmusic review by Margaret Reges
- ↑ Notes to Library of Congress catalog record for Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy: Historical Alabama Field Recording
- ↑ Some Historical Folk Songs from Alabama. by Byron Arnold. Journal of the International Folk Music Council. Vol. 6, (1954), pp. 45-47.
- ↑ Library of Congress Biography of Vera Hall (1902-1964)
- ↑ Mrs. Carlton remembers folk song collector by Erin Kellen, August 1993
- ↑ album listing