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American Folklife Center: Research Awards, Fellowships and Funded Internships

List of previous Reed Fund awardees and their projects.

Previous Reed Fund Awardees

Seated man playing fiddle.
Carl Fleischhauer, photographer. Folklorist Alan Jabbour performs at Appalachian South Folklife Center, Pipestem, West Virginia. 1973. American Folklife Center.

2022 Awardees

E. Anthony (Tony) Collins, a filmmaker and teacher from Los Angeles, California, received a Henry Reed Fund award to support his project Missouri Fiddlin’: A Digital Archive of Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri. Reed funds will support the revitalization of Collins 1970s-1980s documentation project that recorded numerous prominent regional fiddlers; the online dissemination of the project’s materials; and follow-up contemporary interviews with Gordon McCann and Howard Marshall, longstanding musicians in the Missouri Old-time community. In addition, Reed funds will facilitate the acquisition of the Missouri Fiddlin’ Collection and resulting documentation by the LOC and others, using SEO and other tools.

2020 Awardees

Bean String Ballad Sing. William Ritter of North Carolina received a Reed Fund Award to organize, produce, and document an event that will be both a ballad sing and a working bee for preparing beans by methods traditional in the North Carolina mountains. The event will be documented on audio and video, and the American Folklife Center archive will be offered copies of the documentation.

Emma Hayes Dusenbury Project. Nora Rodes, researcher, singer, and high school student from Pittsburgh, received a Reed Award for a project to increase awareness and accessibility of the Library’s holdings related to the noted ballad singer Emma Hayes Dusenbury of Mena, Arkansas, whose prodigious song repertoire and other folkways were documented by John A. Lomax, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Vance Randolph, and others. The project includes the preparation of a scholarly paper and the creation of a performance piece centered on Dusenbury’s songs for scholars, traditional vocalists and musicians, and the general public.

Male dancer in elaborate dress.
Carl Fleischhauer, photographer. Men's Fancy Dancer at 1983 Omaha Pow-wow, Macy, Nebraska. Omaha Powwow Project Collection. American Folklife Center.

2018 Awardee

Jamie Fox, of Hays, Montana, for her project "Preserving Métis fiddling on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Montana." A respected Métis fiddler herself, Fox will present workshops in fiddle and dance traditions for the Fort Belknap community of Hays, Montana, as well as to digitize her family’s personal collection of Métis fiddlers from Hays.

2016 Awardees

Emily Hilliard/West Virginia Humanities Council of Charleston, West Virginia: to support "West Virginia Folklife Presents Ballad Singer Phyllis Marks," a free public concert and oral history interview with the respected 88-year-old West Virginia traditional ballad singer.

Mélisande Gélinas-Fauteux of Montreal, Canada: to support travel to the Library of Congress to research field recordings of North American French-language folk songs in the American Folklife Center archive to identify material for her upcoming CD "In the Footsteps of French Folksong."

2014 Awardees

North American Guqin Association of Fremont, California: to present a concert, master class, and roundtable discussion; perform archival research and fieldwork; and publish a documentary CD revolving around the work of the late Chinese guqin (7-string zither) artist Zha Fuxi.

Friends of the Cumberland Trail (Cumberland Trail State Scenic Trail/Sandrock Recordings) of Caryville, Tennessee: to support a year-long series of public CD release concerts in eleven counties along the Cumberland Trail for a recording documenting the grassroots music of the Cumberland Plateau and Cumberland Mountain region of Tennessee.

folklorist interviewing man on porch.
Terry Eiler, photographer. AFC folklorist Mary Hufford interviews Everett Lilly at Stanley Heirs Park for “Tending The Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia.” 1996. American Folklife Center.

2012 Awardees

Arts in McNairy of McNairy County, Tennessee: to develop several projects based on an archive of folk music recordings amassed by community scholar Stanton Littlejohn, who recorded square dance callers and old-time and rockabilly musicians who came to his home between 1947 and 1957.

Otobaji Stewart and Van Nguyen-Stone of Oakland and San Francisco, California: to create a documentary film on the making of ritual drums in the African-based spiritual tradition of Lucumi.

2010 Awardee

Jamie Weems of Ridgeland, Mississippi: in support of an innovative project to reunite local contra dance and old-time string band traditions unique to an under-documented area of Mississippi.

2008 Awardee

Don Roy of Portland, Maine: in support of his project to create and print a book of fiddle tunes from his Maine Acadian family music heritage.

2006 Awardee

Jeri Vaughn of Seattle, Washington: to support reunion concert appearances for old-time fiddle and guitar duo Robert and Lee Stripling in their hometown of Kennedy, Alabama, and to subsidize Vaughn's 30-minute documentary film of the brothers' reunion tour.

2004 Awardee

Elizabeth LaPrelle of Rural Retreat, Virginia, to fund travel allowing this Appalachian ballad singer (then age 16) to perform and compete at music gatherings during the summer of 2004, and to surround herself with older singers from whom she could learn traditional songs, styles, and aesthetics.