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A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures
streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites.

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 The Amish: A People of Preservation
 

"US Public Folklore: The Watershed Years" documents the extraordinary work in public folklore in the 1960s and 1970s with interviews with Alan Jabbour, Richard Kurin, Archie Green, Bess Lomax Hawes, and Dan Sheehy. 1- The Early Years and the Smithsonian Festival. 2- Archie Green's stories about lobbying for the Folklife Preservation Act. 3- The Programs at the NEA and the Library of Congress.

Selected Films

The Films of Tom Davenport and Daniel Patterson

Filmmaker and Folkstreams.net founder Tom Davenport produced the American Traditional Culture series films with Folklorist Daniel Patterson and the Curriculum in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this fruitful collaboration their goal was to create films with univer...

The Films of Tom Davenport and Daniel Patterson

Filmmaker and Folkstreams.net founder Tom Davenport produced the American Traditional Culture series films with Folklorist Daniel Patterson and the Curriculum in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this fruitful collaboration their goal was to create films with universal appeal and rich in contextual development and background materials. Tom Davenport, now seventy years old, is best known for his dramatic adaptations of Folktales in the From the Brothers Grimm series, and Dan (now eighty) for his work as a scholar of Shaker song and history. The two men met in Hillborough, N.C., in 1972, the start of their work together on "The Shakers."

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The Ballad of Frankie Silver
In 1833 Mrs. Frances Silver was hanged in Morganton, North Carolina, for the ax murder of her husband Charles. Tom Davenport's film explores the case through the singing and stories of Bobby McMillon and the comments of North Carolina Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Gray and others.
Narrative & Verbal Arts, Women / Appalachia / 1996
47 minutes | Read More | Preview

Being A Joines: A Life in the Brushy Mountains
John E. "Frail" Joines was a master tale teller from Wilkes County, N. C., on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His hunting tales, stories from World War II, and religious narratives, and the life stories of Frail Joines and his wife Blanche mirror changes that swept away much of the traditional culture of his Appalachian rural community in a single generation and show the character and values with which his family met these circumstances.
Narrative & Verbal Arts, Religion, Women, Work, Agriculture, Family, Rural Life, Sports/Hunting / Appalachia / 1981
55 minutes | Read More | Preview

Born for Hard Luck: Peg Leg Sam Jackson
A film portrait of the last Black medicine-show performer, Arthur "Peg Leg Sam" Jackson, with harmonica songs, tales of hoboing, buckdances, and a live medicine-show performance.
Healing & Medicine, Music, Narrative & Verbal Arts, Aging, African American Culture / South / 1976
29 minutes | Read More | Preview

The Shakers
THE SHAKERS traces the growth, decline, and continuing survival of this remarkable religious sect through the memories and songs of Shaker sisters in New Hampshire and Maine.
Music, Religion, Women / Northeast / 1974
30 minutes | Read More | Preview

A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle
The story of a gifted African American family from the rural South. With interviews and stories, and scenes from daily life, reunions, gospel concerts, and church services, the film traces the history of the Landis family of Granville County, North Carolina, over the lifetime of its oldest surviving member, 86-year-old Mrs. Bertha M. Landis.
Music, Religion, Women, Family, Aging, African American Culture, Social Justice/Protest / South / 1986
57 minutes | Read More | Preview

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