Frank Proffitt, of isolated Pick Britches Valley in western North Carolina, married into the Hicks family, well-known in the area for their musicianship and storytelling. Anne and Frank Warner had become enamored of a dulcimer made by Nathan Hicks, and in 1938 they traveled from their home in New York to Beech Mountain, North Carolina, for the first of several collecting trips. Frank Proffitt played a number of songs for them, including “Tom Dula,” a nineteenth-century local murder ballad. Twenty years later, the Kingston Trio’s recording of “Tom Dooley” shot to the top of the popular charts, bringing traditional music, and the name of Frank Proffitt to a new, main-stream audience, and contributing significantly to the 1960s folk revival.
Beginning in 1929, when she collected her first folksong from fellow Vermonter Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Helen Hartness Flanders devoted thirty years of her life to finding and recording thousands of folksongs and ballads as performed by traditional singers from Vermont and other New England states. She said that she was “allergic” to ballads: whenever she got near them she caught them. The history of the Archive of Folk Culture begins as a story of “song-catchers.” A year earlier, in 1928, when Robert W. Gordon came to the Library of Congress as head of the newly created Archive of American Folk-Song, he brought with him his dream of collecting all American folksongs. While other collectors were typically interested in finding surviving examples of English and Scottish ballads, and were primarily interested in the academic study of song texts, Gordon collected a wide range of songs from a variety of informants. Furthermore, Gordon made sound recordings of the traditional singers he found, in order to secure not just song texts but also their melodies. Read Entire Article: https://www.loc.gov/folklife/guide/folkmusicandsong.html Comments are closed.
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November 2016
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