Folklife Today

Rheagan Martin of the Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled interviews Folklife Specialists Stephen Winick and Jennifer Cutting about the connections of the mumming tradition to the American Folklife Center. Mumming is a folk drama tradition in which groups of performers go house to house singing and performing a play. Jennifer describes the James Madison Carpenter Collection, which contains play scripts, recordings, photos, and drawings related to mumming. Stephen explains how the mumming tradition was brought the Library of Congress. Both talk about the connections of mumming to the solstice and to other wintertime traditions.

In the fourth episode of the Folklife Today subseries focusing on Community Collections Grantees, AFC Events Coordinator Thea Austen and Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas chat with Queen Nur and AJ Rivers, about Queen’s CCG project “Community on the Line: The Culture of Urban Soul Line Dancing in the Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware Tri-State Area,” and the public program the team held at the Library in February 2025. The project was designed to “develop a better understanding of the R&B/Soul Line Dance community from the perspective of its culture keepers and initiate a new and original digitized cultural heritage collection at the American Folklife Center. Queen and AJ discuss the deep community connections documented during the project, potential for continuing the work, and reflect on the transformative joy that people felt during the public event at the Library.

This episode of Folklife Today explores an important collection of Gullah Geechee sound recordings in the archives of the American Folklife Center. The collection features over four hours of Gullah Geechee people singing sacred music, preaching to congregations, and giving testimonies in 1955 and 1956. Courtney Siceloff, then-director of Penn Community Services, recorded this collection at community centers and churches across St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Dr. Eric Crawford, Interim Chair of the Music Department at Claflin University and the author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (University of South Carolina Press), joins this episode to contextualize these recordings and to inform listeners about the people who made them.

In the third episode of the Folklife Today subseries focusing on Community Collections Grantees, AFC Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas interviews Laura Grant, the project leader for the CCG project “Returning to Our Roots: Documenting Traditional Nuwä Harvests.” Bringing together members of the diasporic Kawaiisu community in California, the project documented traditional gathering practices alongside the community’s efforts to develop language revitalization resources centered around plants used for food and traditional medicines.

In the second episode of the Folklife Today subseries focusing on Community Collections Grantees, AFC Folklife Specialists Nancy Groce and Meg Nicholas interview Neil Mellon, the Executive Director of the Habele Outer Island Education Fund and CCG project team leader Modesta Yangmog about their CCG project, “Warp and Weft of Yap’s Outer Islands: Backstrap Weaving in Micronesia.” The project documents the unique weaving traditions of 20 master lavalava weavers, and the cloth’s essential role in the region’s cultural traditions and community relations.