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The Southern Folklife Collection is an archival resource at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, dedicated to collecting, preserving and disseminating traditional and vernacular music, art, and culture related to the American South. The Southern Folklife Collection is located in UNC's Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Folklore Program was one of the first graduate programs for Folklore in the United States. The early faculty included Ralph Steele Boggs , Arthur Palmer Hudson, and Guy B. Johnson, all of whom donated materials that were ultimately placed in the SFC. In 1968, faculty members of the Folklore Program established the UNC Folklore Archives. The John Edwards Memorial Foundation was formed in California in 1962 as an archive and research center named for Australian record collector John Edwards. Following Edwards untimely death in 1960, his remarkable collection of American country music records, along with a wealth of correspondence and other research materials, was strengthened by additions from his American friends and colleagues, including Eugene Earle, Archie Green, [1] D. K. Wilgus, Ken Griffis, Ed Kahn, and Norm Cohen. In 1983, UNC purchased the John Edwards Memorial Collection, and, in the fall of 1986, the UNC Folklore Archives and the JEMC were combined to form the Southern Folklife Collection. The SFC officially opened for research during the Sounds of the South conference at UNC in April 1989.
The Southern Folklife Collection is an archival resource for the study of American folk music and popular culture. Its holdings document all forms of southern musical and oral traditions across the entire spectrum of individual and community expressive arts, as well as mainstream media production. Centered around the John Edwards Memorial Collection, the SFC is rich in materials documenting the emergence of old-time, country-western, bluegrass, blues, folk, gospel, rock and roll, Cajun and zydeco musics. The SFC contains over 300,000 sound recordings, 3,000 video recordings and eight million feet of motion picture film as well as tens of thousands of photographs, song folios, posters, manuscripts, books, serials, research files and ephemera.
Notable collections held by the SFC include those of Apollo Records (1944), Broadside magazine, Guy and Candie Carawan, Eugene Earle, William R. Ferris, Folk Alliance International, Alice Gerrard, Archie Green, Peter Guralnick, John Edwards Memorial Foundation, Stuart Hamblen, George Hamilton IV, Highlander Research and Education Center, John D. Loudermilk, Peter B. Lowry, McCabe's Guitar Shop, Merge Records, Music Maker Relief Foundation, Mike Seeger, and Sons of the Pioneers.
In January 2017, SFC announced a partnership with Yep Roc Records, [2] a record label based out of Hillsborough, North Carolina. As part of the partnership, SFC "will create digital masters of rare archival recordings, which Yep Roc Records will produce, package, and distribute." [3]
Three rare recordings to be released with Yep Roc Records were announced alongside news about the partnership. The first release was a remastered recording of Dolly Parton's first single "Puppy Love" and the original "B" side, "Girl Left Alone." The tracks were originally recorded in 1959, when the singer was just thirteen years old and released on Goldband Records, a prominent southern music label in the 1950s and 1960s. The reissue was in the form of an exclusive 45" vinyl available only on Record Store Day of 2017 (April 22).
The second release is a compilation of classic Cajun music titled Swampland Jewels, also originally released on Goldband Records. The tracklisting includes songs from important Cajun musicians such as Jo-El Sonnier, Boozoo Chavis, Iry LeJune Jr., and Cleveland Crochet. It is scheduled to be released on September 22, 2017.
The last of the initial three releases will be a live recording of Doc Watson, a prolific guitar player and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient known for his "flatpicking" skills. The album, titled Live at the Club 47, was recorded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1963. The re-release date is currently unknown.
Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. was an American folk musician and musicologist. He served as music director and song leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.
BeauSoleil is a Cajun band from Louisiana, United States.
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys is an American rockabilly and Western swing band from California composed of Robert Williams, alias Big Sandy, Ashley Kingman, Ricky McCann and Kevin Stewart. The band is known for its eclectic style, which encompasses rockabilly, Western swing, folk, bluegrass, Cajun, mariachi, rock and roll, folk rock, swing and country.
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.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music. The center and its collections have grown to encompass all aspects of folklore and folklife worldwide.
Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings. He desired to make known the caretakers of culture that inspired and taught him.
Public folklore is the term for the work done by folklorists in public settings in the United States and Canada outside of universities and colleges, such as arts councils, museums, folklife festivals, radio stations, etc., as opposed to academic folklore, which is done within universities and colleges. The term is short for "public sector folklore" and was first used by members of the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s.
Michael Louis Doucet is an American singer-songwriter and musician best known as the founder of the Cajun band BeauSoleil.
Dr. Harry Oster was an American folklorist and musicologist.
The Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage (CFCH) is one of three cultural centers within the Smithsonian Institution in the United States. Its motto is "culture of, by, and for the people", and it aims to encourage understanding and cultural sustainability through research, education, and community engagement. The CFCH contains (numerically) the largest collection in the Smithsonian, but is not fully open to the public. Its budget comes primarily from grants, trust monies, federal government appropriations, and gifts, with a small percentage coming from the main Smithsonian budget.
Archie Green was an American folklorist specializing in laborlore and American folk music. Devoted to understanding vernacular culture, he gathered and commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials, and landmarks which constitute laborlore. He is credited with winning Congressional support for passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976, which established the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.
Goldband Records is an American record label based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, founded in 1945 and best known for its Cajun and R&B recordings in the 1950s and 1960s. Its founder, Eddie Shuler, claimed "the record business is nearly always 90% hype and 10% record".
Cajun music has its roots based in the ballads of the French-speaking Acadians of Canada, and in country music.
McCabe's Guitar Shop is a musical instrument store and live music venue on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, United States. Opened in 1958 by Gerald L. McCabe, a well-known furniture designer. McCabe's specializes in acoustic and folk instruments, including guitars, banjos, mandolins, dulcimers, fiddles, ukuleles, psaltries, bouzoukis, sitars, ouds, and ethnic percussion. Since 1969, McCabe's has also been a noted forum for folk concerts.
Folkstreams is a non-profit organization that aims to collect and make available online documentary films about American folk art and culture.
Tom Davenport is an independent filmmaker and film distributor who has worked for decades documenting American life and exploring folklore. Currently based in Delaplane, Virginia, he is the founder and project director for Folkstreams, a website that houses independent documentary films about American folk roots and cultures.
Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985) was an American anthropologist and pioneer ethnomusicologist. Her work included the study of the origins and development of music among the Jamaican Maroons, and the Puebloan peoples of the American southwest. Her recordings of ancient Hawaiian meles are archived at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Roberts was a protege of Alfred V. Kidder and Franz Boas.
Tia Blake was the stage name of Christiana Elizabeth Wallman (1952-2015), an American writer and singer.
Inez Catalon was an American Creole ballad singer, who was one of the most well-known performers of the genre known as Louisiana "home music". These are a cappella versions of ballads and love songs, drinking songs, game songs, lullabies and waltzes performed by women in the home, passed down from earlier generations to provide entertainment for the family before radio and television existed. Home music is not considered part of the public performance repertoire of Cajun and zydeco music because the songs were sung in the home by women, rather than in the dance halls of southwestern Louisiana which featured almost exclusively male performers.