American Folklife Center Fortieth Anniversary Celebrations

Alan Lomax and Texas Gladden, VA,1959

Blogs & Webcasts

Blogs
The American Folklife Center Celebrates 40 Years with a Year-Long Series of Events: The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC) turns 40 in 2016. To mark the occasion, AFC will sponsor public programs, special events, and other activities throughout the year, celebrating AFC’s role in the preservation and promotion of traditional culture. “We’re very excited to be passing this milestone in the Center’s history,” said AFC Director Elizabeth Peterson [read more...]

Lomax Challenge Videos Part 2: To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the American Folklife Center, we’re running another challenge at the Folk Alliance International meetings: this time we’ve asked performers to select recordings from the whole range of the archive, not just Lomax’s work [read more...]

Read all blogs related to the 40th anniversary celebrations here

Webcasts
Watch concerts, lectures, and other events held at the Library of Congress.

Collections

AFC Field Surveys
Over the course of fifteen years, the Center conducted cultural documentation work in several states and hundreds of local communities across the continental United States. Beginning in Summer 2016, the field documentation from these field surveys will be made available in their entirety to the public. A listing of the projects and the fieldworkers who conducted documentation is now available here.

Lomax Family Collections
In addition to serving as the repository for the Alan Lomax Collection, the American Folklife Center has been associated with the Lomax family since the 1930s. This is a list of more than 120 collections in our archive created by or containing information about the Lomax family (John A. Lomax, Sr.; Ruby Terrill Lomax; John A. Lomax, Jr.; Alan Lomax; and Bess Lomax Hawes) [read more...].

The Lomax Kentucky Recordings
These are documentary sound recordings of rural Kentucky music and lore collected under the auspices of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress between 1933 and 1942. Performed by farmers, laborers, coal miners, preachers, housewives, public officials, soldiers, grandparents, adolescents, and itinerant musicians, they present a full spectrum of traditional expressive culture from twelve of Eastern Kentucky’s mountain counties [website...] (a collaborative project from the AFC, the Association for Cultural Equity, Berea College, and the University of Kentucky)

Articles and Essays

The Changing Field of Folklife
The ways and means of capturing and accessing collections in folklore and folklife have seen much change in the 40 years that the Library’s American Folklife Center has been in existence [read more...]

A Family of Folklorists
The Lomax Family manuscripts, with access to 25,000 pages created primarily by folklorist Alan Lomax during the 1940s and 1950s is now available online. In the coming months over 350,000 pages from the 100 archival collections documenting the work of John A. Lomax Sr., Ruby Terrill Lomax, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax Hawes and John A. Lomax Jr. will also be made available. Researchers now will have online access to the writings of the Lomax family: the field notes, logs and indexes related to the collections, as well as their correspondence and their academic and creative writing projects [read more...]

Buckaroos of the 96 Ranch, Paradise Valley, NV; Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection (AFC 1991/021)

Related Resources

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE)
ACE was founded by Alan Lomax to explore and preserve the world's expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement. It remains an active non-profit organization located at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.  ACE’s sound recordings catalog, comprising over 17,400 digital audio files, is available online.