Awards will be made and announced for those documentaries judged to have important subjects, treated with sensitivity, and shot and edited with skill.

Our first award goes to Ali Colleen Neff in recognition of her work on “Home of the Double Eagle” and “Let the Whole World Listen Right“. Ali’s partner on these videos was filmmaker Brian Graves.

Ali also worked with Folkstreams on an innovative project to codify the logging of shots and scenes during filmmaking using Final Cut Pro. The log creates a searchable database and index of all tapes made for the video. She and photographer Tim Gordon are currently working on a book manuscript and applying for grants to work on a documentary about the Mississippi artists featured on their new (developing) website: www.materialmississippi.org

Ali Colleen Neff has an MA in Folklore and is currently a PH.D candidate in Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Other people stress in their definition of folklore the kinds of cultures in which oral transmission normally plays a important role. In ancient times this included everyone, then everyone except priests and scribes who could read and write. With the spread of literacy it came to be narrowed to pre-literate tribes, or illiterates within a mainly literate society, or people who live their lives without much reliance on writing-that is, cultural enclaves like the rural village, the rural peasant or urban working class, the regional or ethnic or religious or occupational or gender or age-group subculture in a larger society.

Increasingly folklorists have come to realize that these are interrelated issues and very complex. Even in a highly literate society everyone is a member of some
groups in which oral communication flourishes-gossiping fellow workers and neighbors, for example-and many of us in daily life move frequently from roles that demand highly technical literacy or are a part of a very rapidly evolving pop culture spread across the entire country to other roles that are more oral, more local, more slow to change, perhaps even hostile to the influence of the dominant society around them, which they may see as an exploiter.

Some of the oral culture is rather trivial-jokes told around the office coffee pot; some is absolutely essential for physical or psychic survival (like the wood-chopping songs of men in the Texas prison) or importantly symbolic of one’s identity and relationships (like music within some small protestant church congregations or a saint’s-day ceremony in an Italian American community). I myself like to think about all of these ways of looking at folklore as involving many variables, each variable actually encompassing many degrees from “little” to “much.”

The questions therefore become, “In what ways is this folklore and not folklore? And to what degree in each of the ways?” For an example that may clarify this, see the piece I wrote on Shaker song for Tom Davenport’s film “The Shakers.” In that you’ll find a list of variables one can use to distinguish the mainly oral tradition in early Shaker song from the mainly literate tradition in Shaker music after 1870.

This said, what we look for in choosing films for the Folkstreams site are the films that usually focus on both of these things-the oral traditions, especially those with historical depth, and also the subcultures that generate and sustain and find value in these traditions. We especially like the films that give strong performances of these traditions (whether music, narrative, craft, ceremony, work, worship, etc.) and explore their meanings and uses. We like ones in which outstanding and knowledgeable community performers and leaders (”community scholars,” some call them) demonstrate and explain the traditions.

This background also guides the preparation of the background material. We try to foresee what in the important content of the film will be unfamiliar or puzzling to the average person or even unnoticed by the outsider. And we try to get several short but informative essays written about these by someone who is from the culture and can interpret it to outsiders or who has studied the culture and its lore or has at least studied folklore and is interested in exploring the traditions in the film.

In some cases we are fortunate in that the writer has actually participated in the making of the film, as a folklorist working as a consultant to the filmmaker. I worked, for example, with Tom Davenport on a number of his films and (with other participants) helped prepare background materials for them. I was writing my book The Shaker Spiritual when Tom made “The Shakers,” and my book A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver when he was making “The Ballad of Frankie Silver.”

It was Tom’s film project, in fact, that stimulated me to write this book. Folklorist Bruce Jackson worked with the Seegers on “Afro-American Worksongs in a
Texas Prison” and was writing a book on the same prison songs, later published under the title Wake Up Dead Man; he wrote the background materials for this film on Folkstreams. And so on. A sizeable number of films on the website are paralleled by books and articles written by folklorists involved in the films, and these
materials are routinely drawn upon for the background materials. Probably the most delicate problem posed by the writing of the background materials is that the perspective of the writer may differ from that of the community shown in the film. The writer needs to find a way to write respectfully and tactfully about the
material and at the same time honestly. The background materials offer not just praise but also analysis and insight.

The diversity of the films is so great that there is no set list of things to include in the packet of background materials. We do, however, try to have as many as possible of the following:

1. One or more essays on traditions presented in the film and the culture with which the film deals.

2. Biographical notes on persons appearing in the films as major performers, practitioners, or consultants.

3. An account of the making of the film-usually written by or in collaboration with the filmmaker.

4. A biographical note on the filmmaker, linked where available to the filmmaker’s internet homepage.

5. Notes on persons appearing in the films as major performers or consultants, including biographical facts, information about books
and articles written about them, other films about them, recordings they have made, honors received.

6. Suggested readings and links. These include books, articles, and websites bearing on the film and the traditions in it. See for
example “Almeda Riddle: Now Let’s Talk about Singing,” where we link to a site in Arkansas where a library streams the “John Quincy
Wolfe Collection” of field recording and the viewer can listen to many performances by Almeda Riddle and other Ozark ballad singers,
recorded fifty years ago. Another such link is set into “Final Marks: The Art of the Stone Cutter,” where the user can click and
go to an archival site that streams a huge collection of photographs of 18th-century New England gravestones, including
markers by the stone carving family whose shop in Providence, R.I., has had an unbroken history down to carvers who currently practice
there.

7. A study guide for middle- and high-school teachers-this needs to be prepared by someone who has had teaching experience at these
levels.

8. A transcript of the sound track-in some cases this will be crucial for the future use of the film; some dialects now comprehensible will grow very hard for people to understand as the years pass by and the current speakers die.
Email correspondence by Daniel Patterson, 2007.

Even if you lack the latest “Internet TV” gadgets, with a little technical knowledge and the ability to plug some cables in, you can get started watching Folkstreams on your television right now.

Most televisions sets offer several video inputs. Nearly all feature a “composite video” input, which is the simplest, most widely available and lowest quality (however on most standard definition televisions have one). I could try to explain here what the input looks like and what kind of cable you will need, but the folks at Wikipedia have done such a good job, I will send you to their page on Composite Video. The advantage of composite is that hooking up both audio and video is easy, since the same cable carries both.

Connect the cable ends to your television and then consult your computer manual or sound/video card manual to find out what you will need to hook up to the computer. You may need an adapter to convert the large RCA connectors to the smaller 1/8″ connectors found on many sound cards.

A step up from composite is “S-Video” which just carries the video signal. You can identify the connector and read about S-Video. This gives much greater image quality than composite, but you will need a separate cable to carry the audio from the computer to your television. Most televisions offer an input for S-Video and nearly all digital video recorders do, so you should be able to make the connection work one way or another.

The best quality video and audio is obtained through a “component video” input. Most newer flat panel televisions come with at least one component input. You can read about Component Video on Wikipedia to identify the connectors and cables necessary to connect your computer to the television.
I chose to watch Folkstreams through a S-Video cable since both my televisions set (a 20″ CRT) and my video card (ATI 9600XT) both offer S-Video connectors. I connect the audio from the 1/8″ jack on the sound card to the RCA jacks on the television using a special cable with the small connector on one end and the left and right stereo connectors on the other. When I get a flat panel HDTV, I will switch to component video, although the improvement may be minor given the quality of streaming video.

Once connections are made, you should be able to start the media player right from the Folkstreams website and start watching video on your television. You may need to check your media player and video playback settings in your operating system to ensure the video plays on the television and not just on the desktop. When setup correctly, starting a video should playback automatically to the television set in filling the full screen (with respect to the original dimensions of the film).

For my own setup, I chose to purchase a remote control for my PC, so that I could control the volume of audio and the media player from anywhere in the room. The remote allows me to pause the video and start again where I left off should I be interrupted. I can operate most of the media player controls and assign functions to buttons. With the Opera web browser, through the Streamzap remote, I can browse Folkstreams and play any video I want from the comfort of my easy chair.

With the upcoming “Internet TV” systems from Apple, Slingbox and others, watching Folkstreams video on your television set will become increasingly simple. It is expected that HDTV makers will add connections to their television sets making it easy to watch online video. The popularity of video sharing sites almost ensures this.

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