Robert Gordon, first head of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress, with part of the cylinder collection and recording machinery, ca. 1930
In 1928 when Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam invited Robert W. Gordon to become "specialist and consultant in the field of Folk Song and Literature," Gordon had already conceived and launched his lifetime mission to collect the entire body of American folk music. He called it a "national project with many workers."
Gordon attended Harvard University between 1906 and 1917 and then left in order to devote all his free time to this collecting enterprise. Supporting himself through teaching, writing and the occasional grant, Gordon traveled from the waterfronts of Oakland and San Francisco, Calif., to Asheville, N.C., and Darien, Ga., collecting and recording folk songs with his Edison wax-cylinder machine. He wrote a monthly column in Adventure magazine, "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," asking readers to send in copies of all the folk songs they could remember. And he contacted Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, to discuss his dream and seek institutional support.
Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter with his 12-string guitar, in a 1940s photo. Through his connection with Alan Lomax, Leadbelly became widely known and emerged as one of the stars of the folk revival movement.
Engel believed that American grassroots traditions should be represented in the national library, and he wrote in "The Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress" for 1928:
There is a pressing need for the formation of a great centralized collection of American folk-songs. The logical place for such a collection is the national library of the United States. This collection should comprise all the poems and melodies that have sprung from our soil or have been transplanted here, and have been handed down, often with manifold changes, from generation to generation as a precious possession of our folk.
Gordon was not the first to use the latest technology to document America's national traditional culture, nor Engel the first to acknowledge its importance. Thomas A. Edison's wax-cylinder recording machine became available commercially about 1888. The machine facilitated documentary work by many private individuals, as well as persons employed by government agencies and public museums. These ethnographers believed that the history of the American nation ought to include the many voices of its diverse population (a notion that later figured in the creation of the American Folklife Center). They believed that song and spoken word were vital parts of the historical cultural record.
The Folk Archive: The Early History
Gordon's appointment as head of the Archive of American Folk-Song began on July 1, 1928, and it was funded from private sources. There were periodic disagreements with Library officials over his methods, however (Gordon spent a good deal of time in the field and sometimes failed to send reports on his activities), and the private money that Engel had secured to fund Gordon's position eventually came to an end. But the idea of a national folk archive had taken root, and it was revived when John A. Lomax came to the Library in 1932.
Lomax, too, was devoted to collecting American folk song, and the decade-long association of Lomax and his son, Alan, with the Library of Congress established the documentation of traditional culture as an important and integral activity of the institution.
An arrangement with the Library initiated by John Lomax, wherein he would "give to the Library, in return for the use of a recording machine, any records that he might obtain with it," facilitated his own collecting activities and launched a documentary equipment-loan program that has lasted for 70 years. Using successive types of recording equipment from the Library, as recording technologies evolved from cylinder to disc to tape, collectors were able to pursue their personal interests and, at the same time, contribute to the national collection.
Left, Robert Gordon, founding head of what later became the Archive of Folk Culture in the American Folklife Center, 1928; center, Alan Lomax, the archive's third head (and son of second director John Lomax), in a publicity photo from 1940; right, young Mexican girls sing for John and Alan Lomax in San Antonio, Tex., in 1934, during a trip to south Texas to document Mexican American folk music. - Photo of Gordon courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Nye
Alan Lomax became the archive's first federally funded staff member in1936 and served as "assistant in charge." He made collecting expeditions for the Library throughout the South, in the Midwest, and in New England; produced a seminal series of documentary folk music albums titled "Folk Music of the United States"; conducted interviews with performers such as Jelly Roll Morton; and, over the years, introduced Washington, D.C., audiences and radio listeners nationwide to an array of traditional artists.
The desire to distribute the archive's holdings for public and educational uses (an idea supported by Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish) led to the creation of the Library's Recording Laboratory, which produced the first releases in the "Folk Music of the United States" series in 1942. In the 1950s the early 78-rpm albums were converted to 33-rpm, and new LP releases appeared through the early 1980s. As new technologies developed for making field recordings—wax cylinder, disc, wire, tape—the lab acquired machines, developed expertise, and initiated publishing projects to make available to the public traditional music that was thought at the time to have no commercial value.
At the same time, the lab had to buy and maintain recording equipment associated with each succeeding technology. In the 1990s the Library produced and distributed CD versions of many of these early recordings, as well as new releases from the world music collections, through cooperative agreements with commercial recording companies.
The expertise developed by the Recording Laboratory, the existence of the equipment-loan program, and the growing reputation of the Library of Congress as a repository for ethnographic documentation appealed to folklorists and cultural documentarians working in the United States and around the world. Library of Congress collections are international in scope, and Library officials supported an international acquisition policy for the Folk Archive. A recording trip to the Bahamas Alan Lomax made in 1935, during his tenure at the archive, may have been the first instance of seeking folklife materials from outside the United States, and the Folk Archive now holds material from nearly every region in the world.
The archive also received an infusion of material when John Lomax, Benjamin A. Botkin (who followed Alan Lomax as "head" of the Archive) and others associated with the Folk Archive participated in New Deal-era programs such as the Federal Writers' Project. During the 1930s hundreds of federal workers were employed in cultural projects around the country, including the Ex-Slave Narrative Project and the California Folk Music Project. When the Work Projects Administration (WPA) offices finally closed down in response to a shifting of emphasis to national defense as the United States entered World War II, Library of Congress officials facilitated the transfer of cultural materials collected by the various agencies to the Library.
Left, Frank Proffitt sings and plays for Anne Warner in Pick Britches Valley, N.C., 1941. One of Proffitt's songs was "Tom Dula," a local murder ballad from the 19th century, which became famous worldwide 20 years later as "Tom Dooley," sung by the Kingston Trio; center, professional storyteller Jackie Torrence at the 1986 National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn.; right, Carrie Grover, the only woman fiddler in the Library's Eloise Hubbard Linscott Collection of New England folklore, Gorham, Me., 1943. - Tom Raymond and others
With national energies focused on the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, folklife collecting activities at the Library slowed, but successive Folk Archive heads continued the policies and practices established by the Lomaxes—loaning documentation equipment and supplies, publishing materials from the collections and encouraging donations of material.
Archive head Botkin (1942-45) helped to redefine and broaden the purview of folklore research to include ethnic studies and cultural traditions found in urban settings. He also encouraged folklorists to become involved in public performances and presentations by traditional artists.
Archive head Duncan Emrich (1945-55) was another Harvard-trained folklorist and historian (like Gordon, John Lomax and Botkin) who advanced Folk Archive acquisition efforts. The growing reputation of the archive following World War II resulted in a flood of requests for reference information and services, both from private individuals and from radio, motion picture and publishing firms.
As head of a newly created Folklore Section, Emrich developed a visionary four-year plan for acquiring recordings from 12 states whose traditional culture was not represented in the archive, with a particular focus on narrative, occupational culture and materials from urban areas and minority language groups. To facilitate his plan, Emrich visited 21 colleges and universities around the country to initiate a network of university-based documentary programs and urge the creation of state folklore archives.
A new generation of regional collectors was at work following World War II, such as Wayland Hand, who worked among the miners in Butte, Mont.; Arthur Campa, who collected Hispanic songs in New Mexico; and Thelma James, who recorded the voices of minority communities in Detroit. The Archive of Folk Culture profited from all these efforts, and collections eventually arrived at the Library (now on the new documentary medium of tape) from Anne Grimes (Ohio folk songs); Ray B. Browne (Alabama folklife); Sherman Lee Pompey (folk songs and folklore from the Ozarks); Joseph S. Hall (folklife from the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee); Harry Oster (Iowa and Louisiana cultural traditions); and Alan Jabbour (fiddling traditions, featuring the legendary Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Va.).
In 1955, when Emrich resigned his position Rae Korson was named head of the Folk Archive. In her new position, she stressed the importance of maintaining and preserving the vast holdings that had accumulated, an emphasis that was consistent with the policies of L. Quincy Mumford, then Librarian of Congress. She was particularly interested in improving reference service and publishing additional recordings from the Folk Archive. In 1963 Korson hired Joseph C. Hickerson as reference librarian; he would later become head of what was by then called the Archive of Folk Song.
Left, musicians of the Haha tribe of Tamanar, Morocco, were recorded by Paul Bowles for the Archive in 1959; right, William "Robot Man" Clark and the "junkyard robots" he created from recycled automotive parts, Newtonville, N.J., 1983. - Dorothy Sara Lee and Joseph Czarnek
Jabbour followed Korson as head (1969-74). He had both strong academic credentials and fieldwork experience, and in keeping with his own interests as a folk song collector, he resumed the practice of making field expeditions. With Carl Fleischhauer, he conducted a field project in West Virginia from 1970 to 1972 to study the expressive traditions of the Hammons family of Pocahontas County, and this effort resulted in a two-LP box set (1973) consisting of music, song, storytelling and oral history.
In addition, Jabbour traveled to various places in pursuit of important collections, and he acquired significant holdings in Native American traditional culture, including a small collection of early cylinders from the Peabody Museum of Harvard University (with Jesse Walter Fewkes recordings of Passamaquoddy Indians, made in Calais, Me., in 1890, the earliest extant field recordings). Jabbour also acquired a large and important collection documenting songs, ballads and folk plays of the British Isles from the American folklorist James Madison Carpenter in 1972.
The 1950s and 1960s spawned a folk song revival in the United States that included the release of commercial recordings from many popular performers and groups, a proliferation of coffeehouse "folksingers," and spontaneous hootenannies everywhere. The Folk Archive both nourished and profited from this renewed interest in traditional roots music. The collections were a resource for performers of many sorts seeking examples of traditional musical performance (such as Harry Belafonte and Odetta), and the archive gained attention that brought in new collections.
Left, Rae Korson interviews Taaqiyáa of the Kaagú Usarufa in Papua New Guinea, 1967; center, "Fancy Dancers" participate at the 1984 Omaha Tribal Powwow in Macy, Neb.; right, Folklorist Erika Brady makes a copy of a wax-cylinder recording as part of the Library's Federal Cylinder Project, ca. 1980. - Dorothy Sara Lee and Carl Fleischhauer
In 1974 Jabbour moved to the National Endowment for the Arts to direct the newly created Folk Arts Program there, and Hickerson became head of the archive. Hickerson argued the case for the importance of documenting and collecting material from the folk song revival. Under Hickerson's leadership, special emphasis was placed on organization and cataloging of the archive collections; creation of listening tapes to facilitate the study of the holdings by visiting scholars; and the further production and dissemination of recordings. Between 1974 and 1976, as part of its American Bicentennial program, the Library issued the first five albums in a new 15- album series, "Folk Music of America," "in celebration of the American Revolution Bicentennial by the Library of Congress, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts."
The American Folklife Center
During the decade preceding the establishment of the American Folklife Center, in 1976, a number of factors conjoined to bring about the legislation that created it. The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife was held for the first time on the National Mall in 1967, bringing a wide range of traditional artists to Washington and winning congressional support. About the same time, the approaching American bicentennial stimulated a reexamination of pluralism in American life. A number of dedicated people, notably folklorist and labor historian Archie Green, walked the halls of Congress to lobby for congressional recognition of the importance of regional and ethnic cultures. And many cultural specialists believed the time was right for a national center devoted to the preservation and study of folklife.
The American Folklife Preservation Act, Public Law 94-201, which resulted from these efforts, was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on Jan. 2, 1976. It defines the term "American folklife" as "the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional." It states that "the diversity inherent in American folklife has contributed greatly to the cultural richness of the Nation and has fostered a sense of individuality and identity among the American people."
Jabbour became the first director of the American Folklife Center in September 1976. The center's enabling legislation calls for the establishment and maintenance of a national archive "with any Federal department, agency, or institution." But, of course, a folk archive was near at hand, and the Archive of Folk Culture was transferred from the Library's Music Division to the center in 1978. Thus the traditional archival activities of acquisition, processing, preservation and reference have remained central to the mission and the daily life of the American Folklife Center.
In 1977, the first full year of its operations, the American Folklife Center launched two field documentary projects—the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project and the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project—setting a pattern that came to characterize much of the center's early work. One project was urban and one rural, but both emphasized the importance of documenting artistic traditions professionally, using both sound recordings and still photography, with an eye to creating public products (such as books and exhibitions) and building the collections in the Folk Archive. Teams of center field workers sought to document not only music but also verbal arts, material culture and occupational traditions, as well as other aspects of traditional culture.
Over the years the center has conducted cultural heritage surveys in northern Maine; Lowell, Mass.; the New Jersey Pine Barrens and Paterson, N.J.; along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina; and in the New River Gorge in West Virginia. One project took center staff and contract field workers to five western states to study Italian American traditions as part of the Library's commemoration of the Columbus Quincentenary.
At left, Margaret Moody, age 95, sings songs passed down from her family for folklorist Anne Grimes in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1955. Above right, Wefing's Marine Supplies store in Apalachicola, Fla., where locals met to share and preserve local fishing practices and traditions, 1986. - James Grimes and David A. Taylor
In 1979 the center launched the Federal Cylinder Project, one of its most ambitious undertakings. Since its creation, the archive had received thousands of original, one-of-a-kind wax-cylinder recordings of ethnographic material as a result of field documentation conducted from1890 through the 1930s, primarily of American Indian music. In the 1930s and 1940s, some were copied onto disc, and, beginning in the 1960s, others were copied onto magnetic tape.
The Federal Cylinder Project was established to arrange, catalog and transfer to preservation tape this priceless heritage of music. In addition, the project made cassette tape copies of the recordings to return to the tribes of origin. This last activity exemplified a central tenet of the Folk Archive (and of many ethnographic archives throughout the United States): that the documentary materials ultimately belong to the communities of origin.
Since the American Folklife Center's establishment in 1976, the Folk Archive has grown dramatically, both from the field documentation initiatives undertaken by the center itself and from the acquisition of major collections. The archive was officially named the Archive of Folk Culture in 1981 to reflect the breadth of its collections.
Peggy A. Bulger succeeded Jabbour as director of the American Folklife Center in July 1999; and in October 1999 the center was granted permanent authorization by Congress. Through Bulger's leadership, the center has acquired a number of large and important collections, from the International Storytelling Foundation, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the Aaron Ziegelman Foundation and Pete Seeger.
Today the Archive of Folk Culture contains more than 3 million items and is truly the national folk archive of the United States. In keeping with the multicultural character of American society and the international scope of the Library of Congress, its holdings also encompass folklife materials from around the world. Michael Taft was appointed head of the archive in 2002.
In November 2000 the American Folklife Center launched the Veterans History Project, which was authorized by Public Law 106-380 and approved by President Bill Clinton on Oct. 27, 2000. The Veterans History Project is designed to collect and preserve the personal stories of America's war veterans and make selections from these stories available over the Internet. This immense project has been undertaken with the cooperation and participation of many project partners, including the military service organizations, many individual volunteers, and supported by a major grant from AARP.
Thus does the American Folklife Center find itself newly engaged in its mission "to preserve and present American folklife" in the 21st century as it continues to fulfill the dream of the Folk Archive's first inspired collector, Robert W. Gordon, who sought to gather together in a national archive all our songs and stories, a great task he regarded as "a national project with many workers."
