Each tab below identifies the Heritage Award winners for whom the American Folklife Center has identified content in our archives, arranged by year of their award. The searches are based on what we find when we limit our searches for awardees' names in the overall Library of Congress online catalog to items found in the American Folklife Center collections. These searches, however, sometimes provide misleading links so it is necessary to check the actual catalog records to be certain that an entry definitely includes the specific awardee and not someone else with a similar name. Some awardees appear in entries with abbreviated names or nicknames.
In general, the Folklife Center has more documentation for earlier recipients of the award than for more recent ones. Given that this is principally an audiovisual archive, the documentation the Center does have is predominantly that of people in the performing arts: musicians, storytellers, and others featured over the years in our concert and lecture series. Awardees for traditional crafts are found more often in photographic collections, in groups of interviews, and so on.
Click below to see collections featuring National Heritage Fellows, organized by the year that the artist received their Fellowship:
Click here to see collections made by National Heritage Fellows.
Nancy Sweezy collection, 1915-2009 - Collection of papers, photographs, interviews, field recordings and other audiovisual materials comprising the professional archive of folklorist Nancy Sweezy created in the course of her career as a folk arts advocate, author, and administrator of non-profit folk craft and performance organizations. Includes research materials for her books Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition, Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity co-edited with Levon Abrahamian and Sam Sweezy and The Potter's Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery co-authored by Mark Hewitt. Sweezy received the National Heritage Fellowship in 2006.
American Roots collection, 1995-2011 - Collection of field recordings of oral history interviews, some interview logs, a handful of transcripts, moving images, and related manuscript materials documenting individuals from various occupations in California, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York State, Pennsylvania, and Texas from September 1995 to April 2011. Occupations documented included musicians, food service employees, writers, educators, craftspersons, ranchers and cowboys, government workers, factory workers, religious leaders, small business owners, radio and TV staff, among others. The interviews were conducted primarily by National Heritage Fellow Nick Spitzer, host of the public radio program, "American Routes," and selections of many of them were broadcast as part of their shows. Spitzer received the National Heritage Fellowship in 2023.
Bobby Fulcher Tennessee and Kentucky recordings, 1977-1979 - A collection of sound recordings, audio logs, song lists, and correspondence by Bobby Fulcher documenting musicians in the Cumberland Plateau region of Tennessee and Kentucky including banjoist Dee Hicks and fiddler Clyde Davenport. The documentation was made as part of the American Folklife Center's Equipment Loan project.
