Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.
The collections held by the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress comprise cultural documentation of folk and traditional culture from six continents, every U.S. state and territory, and the District of Columbia. Additionally, AFC staff maintain reference resources that provide descriptive access to our collections; create digital publications such as blogs or podcasts that offer interpretation and context for our collections; and produce public programming that augments collection materials.
These geographic guides offer entry points into the above resources, and draw on the collective knowledge and expertise of the AFC staff.
American Folklife Center collections from Mississippi document expressive culture from nearly every corner of the state and span nearly a century. Beginning with Lomax family recordings made at Parchman Penitentiary in 1933 and continuing with StoryCorps interviews made today, AFC collections illustrate the rich variety of folklife in this cradle of American creative genius.
Particularly noteworthy are twenty-five years of recordings made by African American inmates at Parchman by the Lomaxes and others as well as similar musical traditions such as Delta blues and fife and drum repertoires in the Mississippi Hill country. The Center also has material culture documentation, vernacular religion, and occupational folklife in its Mississippi collections.
The Alan Lomax Collection includes ethnographic field documentation, materials from Lomax’s various projects, and cross-cultural research created and collected by Alan Lomax and others on traditional song, music, dance, and body movement from around the world. Lomax conducted fieldwork in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia (Republic), Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales from the 1930s-1990s.
Fieldwork and other activities in Mississippi wove throughout Lomax's long career and included the legendary 1941-1942 fieldtrip to the Mississippi Delta with John Work III and Lewis Jones. The team recorded sermons, tales, and especially bluesmen such as Son House and Muddy Waters. Lomax's autobiography Land Where the Blues Began centers on his experiences in Mississippi.
The following materials link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to digital content are provided when available.
In the early 1970s photographer and documentary filmmaker Michael Ford left graduate school and a college teaching position in Boston, Massachusetts, packed his young family into a van, and headed to rural Mississippi, where he spent the next four years recording everyday life through interviews, still photographs, and film. The project took him to Oxford (in Lafayette County), as well as to Marshall, Panola, and Tate Counties, to a remote area north of Sardis Lake. His efforts resulted in the award-winning documentary film Homeplace (1975), but none of the still photographs from this time were ever published. With this illustrated volume, those photographs are now available and offer a valuable window onto the rural, local culture of northern Mississippi at that time.