Good afternoon, I’m Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The Center was created by an act of Congress in 1976 to “preserve and present American folklife” and we are home to the world’s largest ethnographic archive, with over 4 million items, in every format, including film and video formats. These recordings are part of our cultural heritage and continue to be invaluable to scholars and artists, who research the folk cultures that inform our lives. The American Folklife Center is pleased to be associated with Folkstreams, a unique web initiative to make ethnographic documentary films available to all through preservation and access.

www.folkstreams.net is a video-streaming website, built as a national repository of documentary films and videos that celebrate American roots culture. These films have been produced by independent filmmakers, folklorists, anthropologists and others and they document the diverse cultures that make up the American experience – music, dance, storytelling, craft, folk medicine, belief, rituals and family folklore are all found in the films of Folkstreams. The idea for Folkstreams grew out of attempts by documentary filmmakers to get their films seen, since they don’t often fit the mold for mass-market outlets, and this is work that mainstream corporate sponsors have ignored over the years. However, Folkstreams carries some of the most significant and artistic documentaries of the 20th century . . . this is not YouTube! Like the Farm Security Administration photo collection at the Library of Congress, or the Alan Lomax field recordings of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Jelly Roll Morton at the American Folklife Center, Folkstreams will define important aspects of our national culture, these films are essential to our cultural memory. The films preserve the style and the context of enacted folk performance, two keys to the interpretation of a text, an object, or an event that, before the advent of film technology, could not be adequately documented.

The films are streamed on the website together with extensive background materials that highlight the importance of the documentary record. This project was the brainchild of Tom Davenport, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Tom to you today.

Tom Davenport is an independent filmmaker and distributor who hails from Delaplane, Virginia. He graduated from Yale University and went to Hong Kong with a Yale program to teach English in New Asia College. He subsequently spent several years in Taiwan studying Chinese language and culture. He began his filmmaking career by working with documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and Don Pennebacker in NYC. His first documentary film was completed in 1969 on the Chinese traditional art of Tai Chi. The next year he returned to rural Virginia and established an independent film company with his wife and co-producer, Mimi. They are best known for a series of films that feature traditional folktales, titled “From the Brothers Grimm” and they won the Andrew Carnegie Award from the American Library Association for “Best Children’s Film of 1998″. When Tom met up with folklorist Dan Patterson of the folklore faculty at UNC at Chapel Hill, they produced a series of folklife documentaries that celebrate southern culture and are used regularly in the training of folklorists.

Tom was the inspiration and perspiration behind Folkstreams, which has taken off in a major way in the past few years. It is fitting that the AFI Silver Theater is honoring Folkstreams today, so please welcome the Godfather of Folkstreams, Tom Davenport.

Twenty years have passed since we made Catching the Music. With the exception of those who attended the portions filmed at Arena Stage, and some of them–I hesitate to call them extras-have come here today, as well as fiddler Alan Jabbour, who’s out of town this weekend at a conference–otherwise he’d have been here too-everyone seen in the film has passed on. Seven months after it first aired, Doc Hopkins died, in January 1988, a few days short of his 88th birthday. And both Virgil and Mabel Anderson have gone on too.

Looking back, I guess if any line in the film still echoes for me, it’s when Fleming says, “We are a family, a family is not necessarily just blood.” I’ve come to realize over the years just how richly he knew that to be true, to be even possible. Fleming himself had been adopted as a boy, and that part of his life with a family not necessarily blood turned out well for him. Now, as his words linger in memory, his home, that apartment up in an attic, also comes to mind.

On those evenings there in his eagle’s nest we faced each other in the blue light from his color television and the yellow light from his collection of kerosene lamps. With his banjo in his lap, he’d drink bourbon after bourbon, the amber liquid spinning around the ice cubes in his glass. His long, gnarled fingers reaching always for another unfiltered cigarette.

At those times, too, lyrics surfaced in his mind from pools of memory many years deep. He would sing:

Long John said before he died,
Two more roads I’d like to ride,
What, oh what can they be,
The Southern Pacific and the Sanctifeed.

Sanctifeed? Fleming was rolling again. Although that last railroad was obviously the Santa Fe, he pronounced it Santa Fee, and then reconstituted it into Sanctifeed. He tied a local pronunciation to a liturgical word and locked it on to a rambler’s lyric. The song’s dimensions enlarged; a gospel railroad lay just ahead. When Fleming found notches like that, I’d be giggling, he’d be cool, and then, with a sly look on his face, he’d say, “Gotcha!”

The tradition had gone so far into his sinews, the music he knew had blended into his frame; the two became indivisible, and the eccentricities of the art and the man merged-inseparable, idiomatic, intuitive.

Fleming often cited a musician from western North Carolina, Bascom Lamar Lunsford. A lawyer by profession, but best remembered as a song collector and performer, Lunsford had recorded more than four hundred pieces for the Library of Congress, the largest contribution any one musician ever made to the folksong collection. Fleming particularly recalled his first visit to the old man’s Asheville home: “My wife and I drove a 1951 MGB roadster straight through to North Carolina. I still remember looking down the sides of those mountain roads. If you fall off in winter, they don’t dig you out till spring. When we got there, Lunsford’s greeting was to show us how he’d perfected the art of writing his whole name without ever lifting the pencil off the paper. After we’d driven fifteen hours from Chicago he wrote his name for the first half hour.” Nevertheless, Fleming maintained, this musician, called the Minstrel of the Appalachians “sang like he meant it.”

Lunsford had recorded an ancient one-chord song called “Darby’s Ram.” The tune, one of George Washington’s favorites, describes a mythical beast who

Had a horn, sir,
And it reached right to the moon,
A man went up in January,
Didn’t get back till June.

Fleming said Bascom sang “This old ramma had a horn.” Fleming wanted me to know this: “Ramma-he didn’t sing ram.” The lesson was: “You play it like you want it to be played. You make a statement. This is me-you’re exposing yourself–this is the way I see it. And that man knew he wanted to sing ramma.” Then Fleming picked up his banjo and sang the old song, and all of a sudden, you saw the mighty animal. He inscribed it, depicted it, captured it.

As these evenings unfolded in his apartment, Fleming would say, “Don’t be afraid to play things simply–what you want all the time is contrast. Play it two-finger, now three….” We’d drift through tunes, celebrating the players and their individual styles. “Here’s the attack of Roscoe Holcomb–that’s east Kentucky two-finger thumb lead…Listen to Wade Ward’s clean lope–that’s southwestern Virginia clawhammer….Look how Uncle Dave Macon rocked the rhythm–that’s the Tennessee black influence….” We were drawing from a national portrait gallery of performers, eliciting notes and reproducing licks the way a lawyer relies on precedents. Our renderings would be indebted to these masters. We might take a song recorded by two entirely different players and combine parts, or work out a whole repertoire from a single musician’s point of view. Either way, the musicians we learned from signified values. There was only one way to thank them: to learn their styles, to publish it to the world, and finally, to go our own way.

A traditional tune has recognizable contours, yet becomes most genuinely alive in the personal solutions brought by its individual practitioners. It is given to us freely, and kept in the public domain. It is cherished and remembered by old people, catalogued and conserved by scholars, saved and affirmed by fans. Discs left in a hat box, records found at a yard sale, instruments taken from a closet, recordings made at home-all of these survivals result from an ethic of taking care.

The lessons my teacher gave me came from another time, almost another world. He also gave me his banjo. It marks a special moment in my life, but Fleming’s banjo is merely on loan to me, and someday it must belong to someone else. In that, it is like the music itself, capacious enough that we can hold it close, and for a time, make it our own.

This process, then, marks not just ancestries but continuities. Present here today are several younger players who are themselves catching the music, making it their own. Over the past several years I’ve come to know Jason Byrd, Liberty Dawne Rucker, and Michael Monseur. I cherish their friendship. I’m not their teacher; they’re far too advanced for that, but I’m grateful that they’re interested in what I have to say, that they’ll listen to any number of recordings I thrust at them, and graciously read the materials I sometimes push across their kitchen tables.

Today, they’ll bring you bits of their own stories in the course of presenting their songs. To that end, I’ve asked my revered musical colleague of nearly twenty years, Zan McLeod, to help me as we place these young performers center stage. If they are like a rose, well, they’re about to be surrounded by two thorns. But Zan is a brilliant musician; small wonder he appears on over a hundred albums. He is a North Carolina native who grew up just a few miles from the birthplace of Earl Scruggs. His grandfather, the postmaster of tiny South Carolina town, played the banjo every Saturday night on the Spartansburg radio barn dance, and now Zan is the keeper of that instrument. It’s a joy to play with him as we welcome now Jason Byrd, himself a transplanted North Carolinian, and whom I’d never have met if it weren’t for Zan. Oh, just a week ago, Jason and his wife had their first child, Sophia, and he hasn’t slept much since. Like Catching the Music seen twenty years later, life moves on.

Stephen Wade
American Film Institute
Silver Spring, Maryland
March 11, 2007

Or visit the station’s website.

Cellphone cameras and digital-video devices have turned college students into campus watchdogs and have made YouTube a household name. In doing so, the tools have generated an amazing amount of digital content.

It would take 161 billion gigabytes of storage space (or, for those who like their standards of measurement more tangible, an equal number of iPod Shuffles) to hold all the digital material created in the last year, according to a new study. The study, conducted by IDC, a firm specializing in tech-related market research, argues that digital information is growing ever more democratic. By 2010, the company says, more than 70 percent of existing digital content will have been created by consumers. –Brock Read (original post).

One person sharing a crazy video may represent a work of art, and if weird or wonderful enough, perhaps represent a work of “outsider art,” or if it represents the creation of a mundane but well made artifact, a work of folk craft. Call it what you like, but when thousands of people start doing the same thing, undoubtedly a folk idiom will emerge, ugly and monstrous from the black lagoon of of the monitor screen.

YouTube does by default what documentary folk filmmakers have done by intent for decades. When people make videos of how they live, what their interests are and create visual stories, they are documenting their folk culture and creating folk artifacts. The folk documentary filmmaker may be more sensitive to discovering the important things to record, take a more academic or “neutral” approach to documenting folk culture, but YouTube content represents both the creation of folk art and culture as well as documenting of the culture. Moreover, it enables people to document their own culture without an intermediary, as most folk documentary work has been done, through the auspices of a folklorist.

This tension between the folklorist and the people they study has led to distrust between the folklorist and their subjects, as well as anger by the subjects who perceive they are being used or the folklorist somehow profits by the culture they created. Enabling people to be aware of and document their own folk culture may have its flaws, but it also opens up interesting new possibilities. It is certain to democratize the study of folk culture. However, it fits with the process of “amateurizng” that has been going on since the middle of the twentieth century, starting with the rise of amateur astronomy and gaining huge momentum with the web. Increasingly, fields of study are under the influence of this “amateurizing” process and amateurs will play a role in academic pursuits whether the academics like it or not.

YouTube enables a “self-documenting” folk culture, in which elements of commercial culture are drawn into folk culture (when video makers spoof television advertisements or incorporate commercially produced culture into their own cultural artifacts). Folk song has a precedent for this, wherein a song published as a commercial “broadside” would be played by people for so long they would forget its commercial origins and begin to change the lyrics to suit their own lives, thus producing a “folk” song. This interplay between commercial culture and the culture people create and use in their daily lives goes on continuously. Between the official culture and ordinary culture, between commercial culture and ordinary culture, creating folk culture and feeding folk culture back into commercial culture (when a folk artist becomes popular enough to be commercial…this process is seen in rap music).

YouTube represents the emergence of a moving picture folk culture on the web, both as expression (folk art) and as documentary (an unconscious amateur folk record). It may be that some of those under the YouTube effect, will decide to point their cameras at folk culture intelligently and consciously and start down the road to becoming a collector of folk life. This has the potential for many more eyes on the culture, catching it earlier and more deeply than a lone “song catcher” wandering through the folk collecting songs just before they disappear (watch Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison on Folkstreams for a folk art that vanished just after it was filmed).

Please tell us:

* The title of the film you were watching.
* Operating System (Apple OX 10, Windows XP, etc.)
* Media Player (Real, Quicktime, etc.)
* Internet Access (Dialup, Broadband)
* Web Browser

Thank you,

Folkstreamer

“These shows, written especially for the Birchmere’s audience, explore one of America’s greatest traditional musicians, Hobart Smith (1897-1965): his inspired virtuosity and startling range of skills, his upbringing in rural Virginia, and the broader musical worlds he inhabited. The program includes banjo, fiddle, guitar, piano, pump organ, harmonica, mandolin, percussive dance, and singing with musicians Mike Craver, James Leva, and Zan McLeod. Similar to Stephen’s past theater pieces, the evening is threaded with the spoken word, and includes a special slide presentation drawn from Hobart Smith’s letters, family photos, and scenes from the Saltville of his youth and his travels late in life to make a new music for us all.”

***
We have spent our week as heartbroken voyeurs of a way of life foreign to almost of us. The simple life of the Amish — no cars, no cell phones, no electricity — a life so unfathomably simple to so many of us. Quaint — kids in hats, women in bonnets, horse drawn buggies. But what is most unfathomable of all is something that became apparent as the Amish community struggled this week with the ghastly schoolhouse murder of five young girls by a deranged, distraught father who then took his own life.

The modern media world descended en masse into this rural enclave as if dropped back through time, poking and prodding the grief of the families and of the community as a whole. And what they found and what we hear from that community was not revenge or anger but a gentle, heart-stricken insistence on forgiveness. Forgiveness, that is, of the shooter himself. The widow of the shooter was actually invited to one of the funerals, and it was said, she would be welcome to stay in the community.

In a world gone mad with revenge killing and sectarian violence, chunks of the globe self-emulating with hatred, this is something to behold — this insistence on forgiveness. It was so strange, so elemental, so… otherworldly. This, the Amish said, showing us the tender face of religion at a time and in a world where we are so often seeing the rageful face. This was Jesus’ way, and they have Jesus in them — not for a day, an hour, not just in good times, but even in the very worse. “The freedom contained in Jesus’ forgiveness,” wrote the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, “is the freedom from vengeance.”

We have seldom seen this in action. So many tribes and sects in a froth of revenge from Darfur to Baghdad and in our own country so many victims and victims’ families crying out in our courthouses for revenge.

To this the Amish have offered a stunning example of the freedom that comes with forgiveness –a reminder that religion need not turn lethal or combative.

I for one as this week ends, stand in awe of their almost unfathomable grace in grief.

Ann Taylor Flemming.

Reference: http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr2006/folkstreams.php