Related Online Resources

Through blog posts, podcasts and videos presentations of public programs and concerts, you can learn more about the American Folklife Center's collections directly from folklorists, specialists, and performers.

Folklife Today Blog

Folklife Today is a blog for people interested in folklore, folklife, and oral history. The blog features brief articles on folklife topics, highlighting the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress, especially the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project.

View ALL Folklife Today Blog Posts

Highlighted Blog Posts

The highlighted blog posts below focus on the topic of music in the United States.

Songs of the Harvest
This blog post explores songs related to summer and autumn harvest celebrations.
“We are Americans”: a Sampler of Songs about Love of Country
This blog post describes and gives examples of patriotic songs, songs about American ideals, and songs about the love of the land.

American Folklife Center Podcasts

Discover the treasures of the Library through its experts and special guests. Find full podcast series produced by the American Folklife Center by following the links below.

Folklife Today Podcast Series
Folklife Today tells stories about the cultural traditions and folklore of diverse communities, combining brand-new interviews and narration with songs, stories, music, and oral history from the collections of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.
America Works Podcast Series
America Works, an ongoing podcast series from the Library of Congress, features the voices of contemporary workers from throughout the United States talking about their lives, their workplaces, and their on-the-job experiences. Drawn from hundreds of longer oral history interviews collected by fieldworkers for the American Folklife Center’s Occupational Folklife Project (OFP), America Works is a testament to the wisdom, wit, knowledge, and dedication of today’s working Americans. These engaging oral histories, which have are preserved in the American Folklife Center’s archive, are enriching and expanding America’s historical record.

Highlighted Podcasts

The selected podcasts below focus on the topic of music in the United States in the American Folklife Center collections.

Christmas Songs from the American Folklife Center
This episode shares some of our favorite songs of the Christmas season. It includes songs derived from English and Spanish medieval mystery plays, children’s songs, cumulative carols, and other fun songs of the season. There’s even a performance by the American Folklife Center mummers, who sing and perform a Christmas play every year at the Library of Congress.
Kumbaya: Stories of an African American Spiritual
With the help of AFC archivists, Stephen Winick and John Fenn reveal the history of a great work of African American folk creativity: the spiritual "Kumbaya" or "Come By Here." You'll hear how it was collected from oral tradition in Georgia and North Carolina in the 1920s, and hear it become the first State Historical Song of Georgia on the floor of the Georgia State Senate. You'll find out how the words "come by here," sung in a regional dialect, came to be spelled "Kumbaya" around the world. You'll hear how some people came to believe the song was written by a white evangelist from New York, while others thought it came to America from Angola. And you'll enjoy performances and commentary from Grammy-winning recording artists, expert archivists, and self-described library nerds. This is the story that got the Folklife Today blog covered by the New York Times!

Public Programs

Since its inception in 1976, the American Folklife Center has routinely hosted public programs at the Library of Congress in the form of concerts, lectures, panels, and symposia. From 2006 on, most of these public programs have been video recorded and made available online.

Playlists and Series

There are a number of playlists available on the YouTube page that gather videos from certain seasons of our Homegrown Concert series External or pull together various lectures as a sampler External of the types of topics covered. You can also simply search "folklife" on the YouTube page External to pull up hundreds of videos.

It is also possible to view entire series of American Folklife Center videos on the Library's website. Those links are provided below. Many (if not all) of the same videos can be found on the Library's YouTube channel.

Homegrown Concerts and artist oral histories
Over 200 videos of Homegrown concerts and oral history interviews with artists, dating back to 2005. The concerts take place in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium, Whittall Pavilion, Madison Hall, or a setting of the artists' choosing (largely from 2020 through 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic).
Benjamin Botkin lecture series
Videos from lectures, panels, and symposia that AFC has hosted over the years. The earliest videos are from 2005, and go on up through the most recent events.

Highlighted Public Programs

For this edition of its Archives Challenges series, the American Folklife Center has invited several distinguished artists to dig into its archives and put their own creative stamps on the songs they find here. Established at the Library in 1928, the Archive of Folk Culture contains everything from the first wax cylinder recordings of Native American song, to John and Alan Lomax's pioneering disc-era recordings, to recent digital documentation of folk concerts of all kinds. Best known performers in the archives include Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, Honeyboy Edwards, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Lead Belly, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Jean Ritchie and soon, the performers in this showcase.

Although all other aspects of Yiddish culture existed wherever Ashkenazic Jews lived, it was only in America that radio realized its greatest and most fulfilling use by and for Jews. Yiddish scholar Henry Sapoznik discusses and shares some of the most memorable and powerful moments in this nearly lost world of ethnic American broadcasting. (Event date: October 14, 2009)

In this 2018 Homegrown concert, Onnik and Ara Dinkjian are joined by an ensemble of outstanding instrumentalists: Tamer Pinarbasi (kanun), Ismail Lumanovski (clarinet), Pablo Vergara (keyboard), Panagiotis Andreou (bass) and Engin Gunaydin (percussion). Onnik Dinkjian remains America's most renowned Armenian folk and liturgical singer. He has preserved Armenian folk songs from the villages of Anatolia in Eastern Turkey, especially in the unique dialect from his ancestral city of Diyarbekir, known as Dikranagerd to Armenians. Ara Dinkjian inherited his father's love and passion for Armenian music. American-born, he plays both western and eastern instruments including piano, guitar, dumbeg and clarinet. (Event date: July 03, 2018)

Music in the United States: Resources in the American Folklife Center

American Folklife Center: Ask a Librarian