Helen Hartness Flanders
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Helen Hartness Flanders
Helen Hartness Flanders (May 19, 1890 – May 23, 1972), 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. Biographical Flanders was born in Springfield, Vermont. Her father was James Hartness, inventor, industrialist, and ...
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Ralph Flanders
Ralph Edward Flanders (September 28, 1880 – February 19, 1970) was an American mechanical engineer, industrialist and politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Vermont. He grew up on subsistence farms in Vermont and Rhode Island and was an apprentice machinist and draftsman before training as a mechanical engineer. He spent five years in New York City as an editor for a machine tool magazine. After moving back to Vermont, he managed and then became president of a successful machine tool company. Flanders used his experience as an industrialist to advise state and national commissions in Vermont, New England and Washington, D.C. on industrial and economic policy. He was president of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank for two years before being elected U.S. Senator from Vermont. Flanders was noted for introducing a 1954 motion in the Senate to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy had made sensational claims that there were large numbers of Communists a ...
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Library Of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages." Congress moved to Washington, D.C., in 1800 after holding sessions for eleven years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia. In both cities, members of the U.S. Congress had access to the sizable collection ...
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American Folklife Center
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. Collections The 20th century has been called the age of documentation. Folklorists and other ethnographers have taken advantage of each succeeding technology, from Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder recording machine (invented in 1877) to the latest digital audio equipment, to record the voices and music of many regional, ethnic, and cultural groups in the United States and around the world. Much of this documentation has been assembled and preserved in the center's Archive of Folk Culture, which founding head Robert Winslow Gordon called "a national project with many workers". Today the center is working on dig ...
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Child Ballad
The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as ''The English and Scottish Popular Ballads''. The tunes of most of the ballads were collected and published by Bertrand Harris Bronson in and around the 1960s. History Age and source of the ballads The ballads vary in age; for instance, the manuscript of "Judas" dates to the thirteenth century and a version of " A Gest of Robyn Hode" was printed in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The majority of the ballads, however, date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although some are claimed to have very ancient influences, only a handful can be definitively traced to before 1600. Moreover, few of the tunes collected are as old as the words. Nevertheless, Child's collection was far more comprehensive than any previous col ...
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Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax (; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. After 1942, when Congress terminated the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independentl ...
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Phillips Barry
Phillips Barry (July 18, 1880, Boston, Massachusetts – August 29, 1937) was an American academic and collector of traditional ballads in New England. Barry was educated privately before undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University (A.B., 1900; A.M., 1901; S.T.B., 1913) studying folklore, theology, and classical and medieval literature. After graduating, he devoted himself to "the cultural history of the Celts and American colored lithographs" and then began collecting variations of both American and Anglo-American ballads in the northeast United States. In 1930 he founded the ''Folk-Song Society of the Northeast''. He edited and regularly contributed to the group's ''Bulletin'', which printed twelve issues from 1930 until Barry's death in 1937. In an obituary printed in 1938, folklorist George Herzog described his theory of "communal re-creation" as a significant contribution to the study of ballads in the field: Mr. Barry, and Professor Louise Pound, attacked the theor ...
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Reel-to-reel Audio Tape Recording
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the ''supply reel'' (or ''feed reel'') containing the tape is placed on a spindle or hub. The end of the tape is manually pulled from the reel, threaded through mechanical guides and over a tape head assembly, and attached by friction to the hub of the second, initially empty ''takeup reel''. Reel-to-reel systems use tape that is wide, which normally moves at . All standard tape speeds are derived as a binary submultiple of 30 inches per second. Reel-to-reel preceded the development of the compact cassette with tape wide moving at . By writing the same audio signal across more tape, reel-to-reel systems give much greater fidelity at the cost of much larger tapes. In spite of the relative inconvenience and generally more expensive media, reel-to-reel systems developed in the early 1940s remained popular ...
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Acetate Disc
An acetate disc (also known as a ''lacquer'', ''test acetate'', ''dubplate'', or ''transcription disc'') is a type of phonograph record generally used from the 1930s to the late 1950s for recording and broadcast purposes and still in limited use today. Acetate discs are used for the production of records. Unlike ordinary vinyl records, which are quickly formed from lumps of plastic by a mass-production molding process, an acetate disc is created by using a recording lathe to cut an audio-signal-modulated groove into the surface of a lacquer-coated blank disc, a sequential operation requiring expensive, delicate equipment and expert skill for good results. The disc is then coated in metal, which is then peeled off to form a negative that will later be electroplated and peeled to create a mother (positive copy) which is then again electroplated and peeled to create negatives called stampers, which are then used as molds in a record press. In addition to their use in the creation o ...
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Aluminum Disc
In the field of audio recording, an aluminum disc (aluminium in the UK and elsewhere) is a phonograph (gramophone in the UK) record made of bare aluminum, a medium introduced in the late 1920s for making one-off recordings. Although sometimes used for making amateur studio or home recordings or in coin-operated "record-your-voice" booths at fairs and arcades, during the first half of the 1930s bare aluminum discs were primarily used to record radio broadcasts for the private transcription disc archives of performers or sponsors.''Documenting Early Radio: A Review of Existing Pre-1932 Radio Recordings''
Elizabeth McLeod, 1988-9
In the record ...
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Phonograph Cylinder
Phonograph cylinders are the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1896–1916), these hollow cylindrical objects have an audio recording engraved on the outside surface, which can be reproduced when they are played on a mechanical cylinder phonograph. In the 1910s, the competing disc record system triumphed in the marketplace to become the dominant commercial audio medium. Early development In December 1877, Thomas Edison and his team invented the phonograph using a thin sheet of tin foil wrapped around a hand-cranked, grooved metal cylinder. Tin foil was not a practical recording medium for either commercial or artistic purposes, and the crude hand-cranked phonograph was only marketed as a novelty, to little or no profit. Edison moved on to developing a practical incandescent electric light, and the next improvements to sound recording technology were made by others. Fo ...
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