The American Folklife Center at the

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 ...

in Washington, D.C. was created by

Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...

in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the

Archive of Folk Culture The Archive of Folk Culture (originally named The Archive of American Folk Song) 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 Libr ...

, established at the library in 1928 as a repository for

American folk music The term American folk music encompasses numerous music genres, variously known as ''traditional music'', ''traditional folk music'', ''contemporary folk music'', ''vernacular music,'' or ''roots music''. Many traditional songs have been sung ...

. The center and its collections have grown to encompass all aspects of

folklore Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging ...

and folklife worldwide.

Collections

The 20th century has been called the age of documentation. Folklorists and other

ethnographers Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

have taken advantage of each succeeding technology, from

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventi ...

's wax-cylinder recording machine (invented in 1877) to the latest digital audio equipment, to record the voices and music of many regional,

ethnic An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

, and cultural groups in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

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 Robert Winslow Gordon (September 2, 1888 – March 26, 1961) was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs. Gordon was educated at Harvard University. He joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 19 ...

called "a national project with many workers". Today the center is working on

digital preservation In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and ...

, Web access, and archival management. The center's archive has about 6 million items, 400,000 of which are sound recordings. The center's collections include

and folklife recordings collected by

John Lomax John Avery Lomax (September 23, 1867 – January 26, 1948) was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lo ...

and his son Alan Lomax; Native American song and dance; ancient English ballads; the tales of "Bruh Rabbit", told in the

Gullah The Gullah () are an African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Their language and cultu ...

dialect of the Georgia Sea Islands; the stories of ex- slaves, told while still vivid in their minds; an Appalachian fiddle tune heard on concert stages around the world; a Cambodian wedding in

Lowell, Massachusetts Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of ...

; a

Saint Joseph's Day Saint Joseph's Day, also called the Feast of Saint Joseph or the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, is in Western Christianity the principal feast day of Saint Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary and legal father of Jesus Christ, celebrated on 19 March. ...

Table tradition in

Pueblo, Colorado Pueblo () is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Pueblo County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 111,876 at the 2020 United States Census, making Pueblo the ninth most populo ...

; Balinese

Gamelan Gamelan () ( jv, ꦒꦩꦼꦭꦤ꧀, su, ᮌᮙᮨᮜᮔ᮪, ban, ᬕᬫᭂᬮᬦ᭄) is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. T ...

music recorded shortly before the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

; documentation from the lives of cowboys, farmers, fishermen, coal miners, shop keepers, factory workers, quilt makers, professional and amateur musicians, and housewives from throughout the U.S., first-hand accounts of community events from every state; and international collections. The images, sounds, written accounts, moving image recordings, and more items of cultural documentation are available to researchers at the center's Archive of Folk Culture and through online presentations on the Library's web site. There, more than 4,000 collections, assembled over the years from "many workers", embody American traditional life and the cultural life of communities from many regions of the world. Collections in the archive include material from all 50 states, United States trusts, territories and the

District of Columbia ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

. Most of these areas have been served by the center's cultural surveys, equipment loan program, publications and other projects. The current director is Elizabeth "Betsy" Peterson.

References

External links

* * {{Authority control Library of Congress American folklore Folk museums in the United States 1976 establishments in Washington, D.C.

Collections

See also

References

Further reading

External links