Preserving the Stories of America

Ethel Caffie-Austin, daughter of the coalfields, is West Virginia's "First Lady of Gospel Music." This program features Ethel performing a range of spirituals, hymns and contemporary gospel numbers...

William Ferris's 1969 movie of singing and preaching in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Shot on B&W 8-mm film. Ferris added the recorded sound later, and it is not in complete sync.

Frogmore Stew is considered a classic Low Country South Carolina dish. This dish is also know as Low-Country boil and Beaufort Stew. The dish gets its name from a place that has only a post office on...

For the past eighty years, believers living in the Appalachian hills of the southeastern US have incorporated handling serpents and drinking strychnine (a “salvation cocktail”) into their...

In 1979 Keir Cline shot footage at the Tenth Annual National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivey’s Corner, a small crossroads community in southeastern North Carolina. The festival had been...