Abstract: This collection comprises field notes, transcripts, memos, ephemera, and other items associated with sound and video recordings assembled at the Southern Folklife Collection. The identifying number for the associated recording as well as provenance information (where available) is noted in the finding aid. Materials in this collection are associated with recordings from a wide variety of collections, including those of Andy Cahan, Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, Bob Carlin, Cecelia Conway, the John Edwards Memorial Foundation, Joan Fenton, Alice Gerrard, Peter Hartman, Glenn Hinson, the Goldband Recording Corporation, John Huddle, A. P. Hudson, Beverly Patterson, Daniel Patterson, Mike Seeger, Brett Sutton, and many others. The recordings in those collections include materials produced for commercial distribution as well as (predominantly) materials gathered in a field context by folklorists. The notes include information on African American music, banjo music, Primitive Baptist church music, country music, fiddle tunes, folk music, folklorists, old-time music, popular music, storytelling, and other topics, chiefly but not exclusively relating to North Carolina or the American South.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: The field notes contain information on African American music and musicians. Several collections, such as the Goldband Recording Corporation, the Guy and Candie Carawan, and Glenn Hinson Collections, contain recordings and documentation on African American music and musicians.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Folders 421-424 in Series 3 (Subject Files) are entitled “African American Music and Culture”.

Folders 4444-4515 are entitled “Labor Landmarks: African American Landmarks”.

In Suberies 10.1 (Audio materials), Audiocassette FS-11486is entitled “Tape 373: African American Congregational Singing: Nineteenth-Century Roots, 1994 (Smithsonian Folkways release)”

Subseries 10.2 (Video Materials) contains a DVD entitled Plenty of good women dancers: African-American women hoofers from Philadelphia (Digital Video Disc DVD-20002/2)

The additions of 2006, 2009, and 2010 also contain many interrelated subject files with the original materials, including materials on Hudie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter (Folder 2258; 4947-53)

 

 

Abstract: Stan Woodward is a southern auteur and documentary filmmaker. The Woodward Studio Limited produces documentaries on southern folk culture through the themes of American foodway and related traditions. In the 1980s, Woodward served as director of the Media Arts Center and the Communication Wing at the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C., where he got to know animator Chuck Jones. Woodward also worked as filmmaker-in-residence in Georgia, South Carolina, and other locations where he was involved in mentoring independent filmmakers and advising classroom teachers on how to teach students to create Super 8mm films. In the 1990s, Woodward worked on productions of Satellite Distance Learning Broadcasts for various television networks. The R. Stanley Woodward Collection consists of about 1400 items created or collected by Woodward, 1932-2004, including films, moving image materials, production notes, distribution and licensing contracts, and promotional and educational materials related to his films and other work promoting independent filmmaking. Films cover a wide range of topics, including southern food traditions; southern families, storytelling, folklore, and customs; African American dance and folk art; NASA, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, the Skylab Program, and astronauts; media programs on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird ; educational films; teaching filmmaking to students; the Capital Children’s Museum; the University of South Carolina; serpents; and sharecroppers. Locations include South Carolina; Virginia; Georgia; North Carolina; Kentucky; Washington, D.C.; New York City; and Alabama. Some of the people associated with the films are food critic Craig Claiborne, John A. Burrison, filmmaker Frank Eastes, John Egerton, Harold Hausenfluck, Fred Wolfe, animator Chuck Jones, Richard Pillsbury, and folklorist Saddler Taylor. The moving image materials are in various media formats, including 16mm print film, DVCAM video, U-Matic video, Betacam SP video, Digital Betacam video, MiniDV video, VHS video, and DVDs. Descriptions have been derived from the original container, film, video, or notes.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: This collection contains materials related to African American dance and folk art. In Series 1, about the tradition of Brunswick Stew in Georgia, Videotape VT-20446/262-267 contains an author’s note about meeting with an African American stewmaster.

Series 2 focuses on Southern Stews and Videotape VT-20446/35-37 depicts the cooking of Frogmore Stew by the African American Faulkenberry family and a neighboring chef in Saint Helena, S.C.

There is also a 1971 film in Subseries 6.1 (Video and Film) entitled Afro-American Dance: Establishing A Cultural Heritage (Film F-20446/17)

Abstract: The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources is the state agency responsible for arts, history, and library programs; among its divisions is the State Library of North Carolina. The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources films collection documents a variety of topics, some relating to North Carolina and others to the wider world, covered in films made by a variety of filmmakers, 1951-1988. Topics include folklife, folk dancing, folklore, and folk art in various parts of the world; tattooing; women’s folklore; African American history, culture, and music; Indians of North America; Canadian Iroquois Indians; Aboriginal Australians; folk, gospel, jazz, and blues music; folk singers and composers Woody Guthrie, Elizabeth Cotten, and Malvina Reynolds; gospel singer Mahalia Jackson; various religious communities; Colonial Williamsburg; poet Carl Sandburg; filmmaker Tom Davenport; and the social life and customs of the American South. All of the films are 16mm commercial release prints with sound. Both narrative and documentary films are represented.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Several of the films in this collection relate to African American history and  culture. A few examples include

Afro-American Music: Its Heritage (1969): This film traces the history and evolution of black American music from enslavement to contemporary music ( Film 20448/22)

Black Genesis: The Art of Tribal Africa (1970 ): The film shows masks, carving sculptures, statues, drawings jewelry and tattoo art of different areas of tribal Africa, as well as songs and musical rhythms (F-20448/15)

Black Music in America: From Then Till Now (1987):  traces the evolution of African American music from its African origins today and showcases  of Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Leadbelly, Count Basie, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Billie Holiday, Cannonball Adderley, and others (F-20448/60)

 

 

 

 

Abstract: The Susan Massingale collection consists of 243 videotapes from four documentary productions, 1987-1995. Massingale co-produced and co-directed one of the productions, Step It Up and Go: Blues in the Carolinas, with Glen Hinson. The other productions are Boogie in Black and White, a film about the Cherokee Indians, and another film about Black Mountain College. Massingale’s connection to these three documentaries is unclear, but they appear to related to UNC-TV and are chiefly about North Carolina. Videotape formats include Betacam, Umatic, and VHS. Step It Up and Go: Blues in the Carolinas traces the development of blues music in the Carolinas through interviews with musicians and still photographs of them. North Carolina musicians talk about how they learned to play and perform different styles on the banjo, fiddle, guitar, piano, bottle, and spoons. Performers include Odell Thompson, Nate Thompson, Joe Thompson, Etta Baker, Cora Phillips, Junior Thomas, Thomas Burt, Guitar Slim, Moses Roscoe, and Anthony Pough. The UNC-TV documentary Boogie in Black and White is a film about the making of Pitch a Boogie Woogie, a film shot in Greenville, N.C., in 1947 by John W. Warner, then owner of Greenville’s Plaza Theatre. Pitch a Boogie Woogie, released by Lord-Warner Pictures, Inc., in 1948, was the first movie made by a production company based in North Carolina. It had an all-African American cast of mostly local Greenville musicians and actors and enjoyed success in the Carolinas, but was never shown outside that area. The Cherokee Indian production appears to be mostly about Joyce Dugan, who was elected Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1995. She was the first woman to hold that position. The Black Mountain College production appears to be about the history of Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, N.C. Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 and guided by the principle that the study of art was central to a liberal arts education. Black Mountain College closed in 1957.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Series 1 contains video of the documentary Step It Up and Go: Blues Music in the Carolinas

Series 2 contains video from the documentary Boogie In Black & White, about the making of the 1947 film Pitch A Boogie Woogie, featuring a primarily African American cast of musicians mostly from Greenville, N.C.

Series 3 contains video from a documentary about Joyce Dugan, who was elected Principle Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokees in 1995.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Included are an interview and 32 Ohio River songs, sacred songs, and camp meeting songs sung by “Uncle” Jim Drain, African American singer from Paducah, Ky. [2 sounds recordings, FT 861-862]

Abstract: Allen Tullos graduated in 1976 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Masters degree in folklore; he also earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. His research interests have centered on American popular culture, the South, cultural geography, biography, and documentary forms. Recordings on cassette and reel-to-reel tapes and documentation about many of the recordings. The cassette tape contains an interview with Cas Wallin of Madison County, N.C., known for his ballad and gospel songs, with Tullos as the chief interviewer. The material was used in a radio program for the North Carolina Broadcast Series. Reel-to-reel tapes include Wallin singing with Edison Ramsey and Evelyn Ramsey and an interview with Virgia Wallin and Dellie Norton that includes information about Cas Wallin. Other recordings document Tullos’s travels in Alabama and Virginia, where he recorded guitar and banjo tunes of Felix Blackwell, Bryon York, and Fred Beckett in Mooresville, Ala. He also interviewed Norman Smith, a potter from Chilton County, Ala., and shape-note singers at two Alabama churches, the Oak Hill Baptist Church and the Little Vine Primitive Baptist Church. He spoke with Frank Staton, an African American blues performer from Marion, Ala., who sings and plays acoustic guitar, and Frank Pickett from Mooresville, who sings self-composed songs. Also included are recordings of the 1975 Hollering Contest at Spivey’s Corner, N.C.; Morris Norton and Evelyn Ramsey, a father and daughter duo who sing traditional Appalachian folk songs; the Gospel Jubilators, a Durham, N.C., gospel group; blues guitarist Furry Lewis; and Alabama herbalist Tommie Bass. Documentation consists of cover sheets, tape indices and content notes for many of the recordings.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Interview with Frank Pickett, an African American musician in Mooresville, Limestone County, Alabama (1975), recorded by Allen Tullos. Topics covered include sharecropping and World War I; also, Mr. Pickett sings gospel songs and tells the story of how the expression “unh-huh” came about. [1 reel, FT1285] Interview with Pickett and Frank Staton of Marion, Alabama, both recorded by Tullos in 1975. Mr. Staton performs songs with guitar accompaniment. [1 reel, FT1295]

Abstract: Primarily life histories, folkways, legends, and other items written and collected by workers of the Federal Writers’ Project of North Carolina, 1938-1941, with accompanying administrative material, including instructions to writers. Most of the life histories are variants of items in the Federal Writers’ Project Papers (#3709) in the Southern Historical Collection, but ten do not appear in that collection. The folkways and legends are chiefly stories concerning North Carolina in the colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War periods. A number of essays relate to Raleigh, N.C. T. S. Ferree collected this material in the course of his work as a research editor with the Federal Writers’ Project in Raleigh, N.C.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There are a number of life histories in Sub Series 1A of African Americans, primarily formerly enslaved men and women (Folders 1 – 7). Sub series 1B contains stories and folktales collected by FWP workers.

Abstract: Field notes and related items produced between 1945 and 1957 by researchers in a project sponsored by the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina. The notes were made during anthropological field work among residents of Avery County, N.C.; Brewton, Selma, and Camden, Ala.; and York County, S.C. Areas explored included technology, housing, food, labor, religion, community structure, and folklore.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Includes research notes from Hylan Lewis, a young African American sociologist who studied African American residents of Kent, South Carolina as part of a larger research project (See Box 6).

There is also a copy of Lewis published research, entitled Blackways of Kent. (See the volume in Series 3).

Abstract: Brett Sutton (1948- ) was born and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. He eared as Masters degree in 1976 from the Curriculum of Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His thesis focused on African American spiritual folk singing around Raleigh and Durham, N.C. Peter Hartman (1959- ) earned a B.S. in 1975 UNC. Hartman, also a banjo player, joined Brett Sutton to explore their mutual interest in religious folk music. In 1976, they moved to southwestern Virginia where they worked on an NEH-funded project called “Religious Folksongs in the Virginia Mountains.” From this research, they produced a book and LP recording called Primitive Baptist Hymns of the Blue Ridge (UNC Press, 1982). Sound recordings and documentation relating to Sutton and Hartman’s NEH project. The folk hymn singing tradition of conservative Baptists in southwestern Virginia in worship services and congregational meetings were recorded in rural churches, and interviews and songs were collected in congregation members’ homes. Supplemental information and transcripts include indices of texts, songs, and informants. Also available is an inventory and comparative summary of tunes collected and the NEH grant application, which includes a narrative about the purpose, significance, and scope of the project.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Interviews and songs were collected in congregation members’ homes. Interviewed were Amos Hash, William Holland, Guy Phillips, Lane Carter, Monroe Simpkins, Myrtle Wood, James Denton, Thomas Claytor, the Reverend M. D. Hart, Elder Clifton, and Mrs. Benny Clifton. Supplemental records and transcripts include indices of texts, songs, and informants. Also available is an inventory and comparative summary of tunes collected and the NEH grant application, which includes a narrative about the purpose, significance, and scope of the project.