Folkstreams

Featured Film
	The Amish: A People of Preservation The Amish keep surprising their technology-programmed neighbors by keeping alive ways and beliefs that many modern Americans wish they could recapture. Mennonite historian John Ruth takes us sympathetically into the Amish mindset. 54 minutes \| Read More \| Preview

"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 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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