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.
John Cohen was an American musician, photographer and film maker who performed and documented the traditional music of the rural South and played a major role in the American folk music revival. In the 1950s and 60s, Cohen was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a New York–based string band. Cohen made several expeditions to Peru to film and record the traditional culture of the Q'ero, an indigenous people. Cohen was also a professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College for 25 years.
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.
Margaret Anne "Peggy" Bulger is a folklorist and served as the director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999 to 2011, when she moved to Florida to continue work on personal projects.
James Madison Carpenter, born in 1888 in Blacklands, Mississippi, near Booneville, in Prentiss County, was a Methodist minister and scholar of American and British folklore. He received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Mississippi, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Harvard in 1929. He is best known for his substantial work collecting folk songs in England, Scotland and Wales. He recorded well-known singers and musicians that other folklorists had documented, as well as some never recorded before or since such as Bell Duncan, whose repertoire consisted of some 300 songs, including 65 Child ballads. His collection methods included Dictaphone recordings as well as transcriptions of lyrics.
William Reynolds Ferris Jr. is an American author and scholar and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Judy Peiser he co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee; he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Sheila Kay Adams is an American storyteller, author, and musician from the Sodom Laurel community in Madison County, North Carolina.
Jack is an English hero and archetypal stock character appearing in multiple legends, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes.
Queena Stovall was an American folk artist. Sometimes called "The Grandma Moses of Virginia," she is famous for depicting everyday events in the lives of both white and black families in rural settings.
Jerry Dolyn Brown was an American folk artist and traditional stoneware pottery maker who lived and worked in Hamilton, Alabama. He was a 1992 recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2003 recipient of the Alabama Folk Heritage Award. His numerous showings included the 1984 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife with his uncle, potter Gerald Stewart.
Folkstreams is a non-profit organization that aims to collect and make available online documentary films about American folk art and culture.
Roland L. Freeman was an American photographer and award-winning documenter of Southern folk culture and African-American quilters. He was the president of The Group for Cultural Documentation based in Washington, D.C.
John Melville Bishop is a contemporary, U.S., documentary filmmaker known for the breadth of his collaborations, primarily in the fields of anthropology and folklore. He has worked with Alan Lomax, John Marshall, and extensively with the Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology.
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 Shakers is a 1974 documentary film directed by Tom Davenport and produced by Davenport and Frank DeCola. It studies the last dozen remaining Shakers in their communities, focusing on their daily lives, music, and spirituality, as well as containing Shaker history and interviews with Shakers. It received positive reviews from critics, and won a Blue Ribbon at the 1975 American Film Festival.
Beth Harrington is an Emmy-winning, Grammy-nominated filmmaker based in Vancouver, Washington, specializing in documentary features. Her documentaries often explore American history, music and culture, including the Carter Family and Johnny Cash, and the history of women in rockabilly. In addition to her film work as a producer, director and writer, Harrington is also a singer and guitarist, and was a member of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers from 1980 to 1983.
Janie Hunter was an American singer and storyteller who worked to preserve Gullah culture and folkways in her home of Johns Island, South Carolina. She received a 1984 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in recognition of her contributions to folk art and traditions.
Neal Hutcheson is an American filmmaker, photographer, and author. He has received three regional Emmy Awards for documentaries on regional culture, language, and identity. He has produced 17 television documentaries on topics such as Appalachian culture, heritage fisheries on the North Carolina Outer Banks, Cherokee language preservation efforts, African American vernacular speech, and climate change. Hutcheson’s most visible work has featured Popcorn Sutton, a moonshiner from Western North Carolina. The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, a book of photos, interviews and essays by Hutcheson, was released in 2021 and received a National Indie Excellence Award and the Outstanding Book—Independent Spirit Award from The Independent Publisher Book Awards, the largest unaffiliated book contest in the world, and was the grand prize winner of the 30th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Hutcheson works as a producer for the Language & Life Project at North Carolina State University and is a contributing producer to independent production companies Empty Bottle Pictures and Sucker Punch Pictures.
The Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP) is a non-profit organization advocating for and providing documentation, presentation, education, and collaborative research to folk and traditional arts across the Philadelphia region in service of social change. Founded in 1987 by folklorist Debora Kodish, PFP offers workshops and assistance to local artists and communities through organizing concerts, events, and exhibitions. Their driving philosophy is that "diversity and equity are central elements of thriving communities." One of a handful of independent folk and traditional arts nonprofits nationwide, the organization is widely regarded as a powerful instrument for socially conscious and anti-racist activism and serves as a model for sustaining living cultural heritage in the fields of applied folklore, ethnomusicology, and anthropology. It seeks to foster growth in communities through access to grant funding and artistic venues, but also material and social infrastructure in defense against gentrification and through cultivating positive inter-communal relationships.
