Library of Congress's Blog, page 15

“Language is Life” and Native American Historical Voices

The anticipation in the small room in Culpeper, Virginia, was palpable as the stylus touched down on a rare 100-year-old wax cylinder recording. Chin in hand, film producer Daniel Golding sat while his son, Nate, stood behind him, hands in pocket.

A scratchy sound emerged, followed by a man’s voice, which Golding identified as his great-grandfather’s. He was singing a deer song in the language of the Quechans, a Native American tribe indigenous to an area along the Mexico border in Arizona and California.

“My great-grandfather was the last one to sing these songs,” Golding said. “There’s nobody left in the community that sings them.”

Golding brought a film crew to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in July 2022 to document a collaboration between the Library and another tribe — the Passamaquoddy of Maine — to recover and share tribal language and cultural practices from wax cylinder recordings in the collections.

Golding’s film, “Language Is Life,” showcases efforts by three Native communities — the Passamaquoddy, the Cherokee and the Navajo — to revitalize their languages and, through language, to revive cultural heritage.

Narrated by Joy Harjo, the former U.S. poet laureate, the film premiered at the Library last November in advance of its broadcast as one of four episodes in the PBS series, “Native America.”

Anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes documented Passamaquoddy folktales, origin stories and vocabulary in 1890 using wax cylinders, the recording medium of the day. The 31 Passamaquoddy recordings donated to the Library are the oldest ethnographic field recordings known to survive anywhere.

The Library holds a total of about 9,000 turn-of-the-20th-century field recordings of Native communities, the largest collection in the U.S. Between 1977 to 1987, the Library’s American Folklife Center transferred these early field recordings to reel-to-reel cassette tape as part of the Federal Cylinder Project.

Since 2015, using cutting-edge laser-assisted technology, NAVCC has been digitizing and restoring these recordings through a project called Ancestral Voices — informally dubbed Federal Cylinder Project 2.0. Ancestral Voices is part of a larger collaboration involving the AFC, Native communities and other cultural institutions to support revitalization of Native languages and cultures.

The task is urgent: According to “Language Is Life,” linguists predict that only 20 Native languages will be spoken in North America by 2050, down from more than 300 in 1492, if language loss isn’t reversed.

AFC is collaborating with communities to curate digitized recordings and release them selectively on the Ancestral Voices portal — communities do not want all materials shared publicly. The folklife center also provides copies directly to Native tribes.

In recent years, for example, it provided the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon with copies of out-of-circulation recordings that allowed the community to reincorporate content not used in 70 years and Sioux communities with copies of photographs and recordings that they said documented the proper way to butcher buffalo, an important cultural tradition..

When Golding heard the newly digitized recording of his great-grandfather in Culpeper in 2022, he immediately recognized a big improvement over a recording his parents had played for him in the 1970s. The speed was corrected, and the sound was much clearer.

For his son, Nate, then 16, the experience was more profound — he had never heard his great-great-grandfather’s voice before.

“I hope these traditions are passed down to the younger generation so the tradition can live on,” Nate said, holding back tears. “It gives me hope for our community to become stronger. It just gives me hope in my heart.”

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Gershwin Winner Bernie Taupin in Conversation

The word “extraordinary” came up a lot in the Coolidge Auditorium last Thursday evening. Bernie Taupin took the stage on March 21 to speak with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about his songwriting journey with Elton John.

The night before, the duo accepted the 2024 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during an all-star tribute concert in Constitution Hall.

The concert itself was extraordinary, Taupin said, as were the renditions of his and John’s songs.

“Metallica, come on!” Taupin exclaimed of the metal band’s raucous performance of “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.”

“He just tore it up,” he said of Billy Porter’s version of “The Bitch Is Back.” And of Jacob Lusk’s “Bennie and the Jets”: “He just was preachin’ now!”

“Hearing all of those songs from those wonderfully diverse acts last night, it was, I mean this from the bottom of my heart, it was really, really extraordinary,” Taupin said.

But perhaps most extraordinary of all, in Taupin’s telling, were the collections of the Library itself, which curators shared with him and John in the days before the concert.

“The things that I’ve seen since I’ve been here are just completely staggering,” Taupin said. “It boggles the mind to know that they exist still — things that influenced me, influenced Elton, influenced us as a unit together.”

Taupin spoke of the lyrics to Marty Robbins’ Western ballad “El Paso” on Robbins’ album “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.”

“It’s still one of the most important records to me in my life,” Taupin said.

Growing up in rural England in the 1950s and early 1960s, Taupin didn’t hear much country music on the radio. When he became acquainted, he was hooked.

“When I heard those songs, I went ‘Wow, there’s a way here that you can actually tell … stories and sing them,’” he said. “What I needed to do was find somebody who could create the other 50% of the magic.”

“Well, that worked out,” Hayden quipped.

Taupin met John in 1967, when they each separately answered a newspaper ad from a record company. Soon, they established a pattern: Taupin writes lyrics, then gives them to John to set to music.

Since the 1969, the duo has sold an estimated 300 million albums and made Billboard history multiple times over. Last year, John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.

They weren’t an overnight success, though.

At first, Taupin said, “I was flying by the seat of my pants.”

His lyrics “all came out on a page, and Elton had to decipher what was what.”

But over time, he became musically proficient. His process now, Taupin said, is “guitar, legal pad, computer, finish.”

He plays a few chords on a guitar, sings a little to himself, then scrawls lyrics on yellow legal pad. Periodically, he types the lyrics into a computer to assess their flow.

He works quickly, but his reputation for speed writing is overstated, he said.

“I didn’t write ‘Your Song’ in 10 minutes,” he joked. “It was probably 15.”

Taupin insists he is a storyteller, not a poet. “I loathe it being called poetry,” he said of his writing. “I want my things to be regarded as stories.”

For inspiration, he draws on the American West — he’s lived there since the 1970s — and literature.

“I have farmed and mined 20th-century literature,” Taupin said, and the writing of Graham Greene “more than most.”

“A lot of my characters are certainly based on characters he created,” Taupin said.

Meeting Greene by chance “was one of the greatest moments of my life, outside of being given the Gershwin Prize,” Taupin said.

Another almost chance encounter also greatly impacted his life. For his 40th birthday party, Taupin — a huge jazz and blues fan — asked his managers in jest to invite Willie Dixon, “probably the greatest blues songwriter of all time.”

To Taupin’s surprise, Dixon came.

“We just hit it off,” Taupin said. “There are a handful of people who were huge, huge influences on my life. … He was so generous, just an extraordinary man.”

After Dixon died in 1992, Taupin found out Dixon hadn’t yet been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Taupin threatened to give back his own awards if Dixon wasn’t added “straight away.” He was.

A visual artist since the early 1990s, Taupin spends more time on his art these days than songwriting. In the early 1970s, he and Elton made two albums a year.

“Now, you’re lucky if we make one record every 10 years,” he said. “Visual art is a huge part of my life.”

Before Taupin took the stage, ticket holders were treated to a special exhibition in the Whittall Pavilion of some of the treasures he and John viewed.

The American Folklife Center and the Recorded Sound Section displayed items tracing the history of the song “Rock Island Line” from a 1934 recording John Lomax made in an Arkansas state prison to a 1940s Lead Belly rearrangement to a 1955 chart-topping skiffle reinterpretation by the English singer Lonnie Donegan.

When Taupin saw the original 78 by Donegan at the Library, he said it brought him back to “a little house in the suburbs of London where I discovered that 78 when I was 12 years old.”

Other items on display included a 1966 ad for a London gig in which John’s then band, Bluesology, opened for The Move, later known as Electric Light Orchestra; a 1967 copyright application filed under John’s birth name, Reginald Kenneth Dwight; and words and phrases Ira Gershwin jotted down in 1926 while brainstorming “Someone to Watch Over Me,” recorded by John decades later.

At the end of the evening, to commemorate Taupin’s Gershwin Prize experience, Music Division chief Susan Vita presented him with a facsimile of Gershwin’s first draft of the lyrics to “Love Is Here to Stay” beside a typewritten final version.

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Gershwin Winner Bernie Taupin in Coversation

The word “extraordinary” came up a lot in the Coolidge Auditorium last Thursday evening. Bernie Taupin took the stage on March 21 to speak with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about his songwriting journey with Elton John.

The night before, the duo accepted the 2024 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during an all-star tribute concert in Constitution Hall.

The concert itself was extraordinary, Taupin said, as were the renditions of his and John’s songs.

“Metallica, come on!” Taupin exclaimed of the metal band’s raucous performance of “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.”

“He just tore it up,” he said of Billy Porter’s version of “The Bitch Is Back.” And of Jacob Lusk’s “Bennie and the Jets”: “He just was preachin’ now!”

“Hearing all of those songs from those wonderfully diverse acts last night, it was, I mean this from the bottom of my heart, it was really, really extraordinary,” Taupin said.

But perhaps most extraordinary of all, in Taupin’s telling, were the collections of the Library itself, which curators shared with him and John in the days before the concert.

“The things that I’ve seen since I’ve been here are just completely staggering,” Taupin said. “It boggles the mind to know that they exist still — things that influenced me, influenced Elton, influenced us as a unit together.”

Taupin spoke of the lyrics to Marty Robbins’ Western ballad “El Paso” on Robbins’ album “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.”

“It’s still one of the most important records to me in my life,” Taupin said.

Growing up in rural England in the 1950s and early 1960s, Taupin didn’t hear much country music on the radio. When he became acquainted, he was hooked.

“When I heard those songs, I went ‘Wow, there’s a way here that you can actually tell … stories and sing them,’” he said. “What I needed to do was find somebody who could create the other 50% of the magic.”

“Well, that worked out,” Hayden quipped.

Taupin met John in 1967, when they each separately answered a newspaper ad from a record company. Soon, they established a pattern: Taupin writes lyrics, then gives them to John to set to music.

Since the 1969, the duo has sold an estimated 300 million albums and made Billboard history multiple times over. Last year, John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.

They weren’t an overnight success, though.

At first, Taupin said, “I was flying by the seat of my pants.”

His lyrics “all came out on a page, and Elton had to decipher what was what.”

But over time, he became musically proficient. His process now, Taupin said, is “guitar, legal pad, computer, finish.”

He plays a few chords on a guitar, sings a little to himself, then scrawls lyrics on yellow legal pad. Periodically, he types the lyrics into a computer to assess their flow.

He works quickly, but his reputation for speed writing is overstated, he said.

“I didn’t write ‘Your Song’ in 10 minutes,” he joked. “It was probably 15.”

Taupin insists he is a storyteller, not a poet. “I loathe it being called poetry,” he said of his writing. “I want my things to be regarded as stories.”

For inspiration, he draws on the American West — he’s lived there since the 1970s — and literature.

“I have farmed and mined 20th-century literature,” Taupin said, and the writing of Graham Greene “more than most.”

“A lot of my characters are certainly based on characters he created,” Taupin said.

Meeting Greene by chance “was one of the greatest moments of my life, outside of being given the Gershwin Prize,” Taupin said.

Another almost chance encounter also greatly impacted his life. For his 40th birthday party, Taupin — a huge jazz and blues fan — asked his managers in jest to invite Willie Dixon, “probably the greatest blues songwriter of all time.”

To Taupin’s surprise, Dixon came.

“We just hit it off,” Taupin said. “There are a handful of people who were huge, huge influences on my life. … He was so generous, just an extraordinary man.”

After Dixon died in 1992, Taupin found out Dixon hadn’t yet been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Taupin threatened to give back his own awards if Dixon wasn’t added “straight away.” He was.

A visual artist since the early 1990s, Taupin spends more time on his art these days than songwriting. In the early 1970s, he and Elton made two albums a year.

“Now, you’re lucky if we make one record every 10 years,” he said. “Visual art is a huge part of my life.”

Before Taupin took the stage, ticket holders were treated to a special exhibition in the Whittall Pavilion of some of the treasures he and John viewed.

The American Folklife Center and the Recorded Sound Section displayed items tracing the history of the song “Rock Island Line” from a 1934 recording John Lomax made in an Arkansas state prison to a 1940s Lead Belly rearrangement to a 1955 chart-topping skiffle reinterpretation by the English singer Lonnie Donegan.

When Taupin saw the original 78 by Donegan at the Library, he said it brought him back to “a little house in the suburbs of London where I discovered that 78 when I was 12 years old.”

Other items on display included a 1966 ad for a London gig in which John’s then band, Bluesology, opened for The Move, later known as Electric Light Orchestra; a 1967 copyright application filed under John’s birth name, Reginald Kenneth Dwight; and words and phrases Ira Gershwin jotted down in 1926 while brainstorming “Someone to Watch Over Me,” recorded by John decades later.

At the end of the evening, to commemorate Taupin’s Gershwin Prize experience, Music Division chief Susan Vita presented him with a facsimile of Gershwin’s first draft of the lyrics to “Love Is Here to Stay” beside a typewritten final version.

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Working with Young Readers: Monica Smith

Monica Smith is chief of the Informal Learning Office.

Tell us about your background.

I’m a native Californian. I grew up in San Diego with my teacher parents and sister, earned a bachelor’s degree in American history at Pomona College, then worked briefly in San Francisco before moving to Washington, D.C.

A high school internship at the San Diego History Center’s Research Archives inspired me to pursue four more internships through and just after college, ending with the Smithsonian Institution. In 1995, I began my career at the National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Starting as a researcher, I became an exhibition curator, an educator, a project director and, finally, acting deputy director of the center. I transitioned to the Library in December 2023.

What brought you to the Library, and what do you do?

After three decades at the Smithsonian, I was ready for a career move, and the Library was about the only place I could think of that would be a step up. Fortunately, the position of chief of the Informal Learning Office felt like the perfect fit for my interests, skills and experience.

It’s a thrill to work in the nation’s library to help engage, educate and inspire the next generation of researchers and their families. I enjoy overseeing the team spearheading ILO’s new monthly Family Days at the Library featuring creative hands-on activities with related take-home resources based on Library collections.

ILO also runs the Young Readers Center and Programs Lab in the Jefferson Building; writes the blog Minerva’s Kaleidoscope for families and educators; hosts or co-hosts internships, including for teens; and pilots on-site and online school programs as we gear up for the opening of The Source: A Creative Research Studio for Kids, part of the visitor experience, in 2026.

My overall goal is to raise the profile of the Library’s programs and resources among more, and more diverse, youth and families.

What are some of your standout projects?

At the Smithsonian I was proud to be the project director, co-curator and principal investigator for three National Science Foundation-funded exhibition projects, “Invention at Play,” “Places of Invention” and “Change Your Game/Cambia tu juego,” which opens at the National Museum of American History on March 15.

Among my friends, however, I’m best known for being the curator of an exhibition about the invention of the electric guitar early in my career. I gave numerous presentations about it, wrote articles and was a featured speaker in the film “Electrified: The Guitar Revolution.” I was also interviewed on BBC, CNN and other media outlets, including a local news broadcast honoring Prince after his death. My first project nickname “Stratocaster Woman” evolved into “Monicaster,” a name I’m still called by former colleagues.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

My main passion — besides spending quality time with family and friends, reading, baking and volunteering — is most certainly travel. I’m on a quest to visit as many countries as my age; currently, I’m a couple ahead at 55.

Just since 2019, I’ve been to Bali, Belgium, Costa Rica, Croatia, England, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, Qatar, Singapore, Switzerland and Turkey. Overall, my favorite trip was probably to the Galápagos Islands with Egypt and Tanzania close behind.

I’ve also loved touring all 50 U.S. states. If you come to my office in the Madison Building, you’ll see a world map on the wall with pins showing where I’ve been. It inspires me to think about where I want to travel next and maybe spend more time in retirement.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you?

I attended a public school in San Diego for the creative and performing arts. It was an amazing experience to be part of a very racially and economically diverse student body with kids from across the city. It didn’t matter your age, background or even talent: You could participate in any art that interested you.

I focused on playing the violin, singing in choir and taking ballet, but I also dipped my toes into dramatic acting, musicals and all kinds of dance. I also loved academics, especially history and English.

The experience helped build my self-confidence, providing tools I still use for giving public speeches or even just meeting new people. It also instilled in me a lifelong love and appreciation for the arts and for youth education.

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Blood Sausage and Family Ties: An Immigrant Story

This is a guest post by Clinton Drake, a reference librarian in the History and Genealogy Section.

Listen: It turns out my family used to eat blood.

As far as I know, we’re not vampires or anything — although my people do hail from the dark lands of northern Europe — but no kidding, the things you learn looking through old grocery lists.

In my case, these lists were a pair of thin, palm-sized grocery store account books for Juho (John) Säkkinen, my second great-grandfather. In the 1880s, he emigrated from the tiny town of Taivalkoski, Finland (population about 3,000), to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Nearly 50 years later, as the Depression began, he was shopping at a local store and had a certain amount of credit, as was common then. Someone in the family would stop by to pick up a few things and the storekeeper (Charles Tossava, another Finn) would jot down the item and the cost, the payment to be arranged later. The Säkkinen family account shows a mix of Old World staples and American brand names, a glimpse into the life of an immigrant family in the small-town world of the Midwest in another era.

“1 # Sillaka” (salted herring) 15 cents,” Tossava scrawled in pencil. “1 pkg Corn Flakes, 10 cents.” And so on.

And then, on March 24, 1932, he scratched out on a line by itself: “Blood. 22 cents.”

A page from Juho Säkkinen’s 1932 grocery account, with “Blood” as the fifth item. Photo: Clinton Drake.

That certainly caught my attention. I had come across these books during a recent move from my Texas-sized home in Austin to my D.C.-sized apartment in the nation’s capital, starting a new job at the Library. I tend to be the unofficial keeper of the family flame, with heirlooms that others don’t want somehow finding their way to me. But this move required some serious downsizing, so I found myself going through a stack of such things, saw the account books and started flipping through them, curious.

Before I could fully register the surprise of seeing “blood,” I was transported back to the world of my youth. Memories came flooding back of my grandmother, Juho’s granddaughter, telling me about the strange foods of “our people.” Kalamojakka (fish head stew), lutefisk (dried fish rehydrated in lye) and … blood soup.

But was that a real memory, blood soup?

So, professional librarian and personal family heirloom keeper that I am, I did some research into my Finnish roots. I quickly found a soup recipe with dumplings. It was prepared from rye flour and reindeer blood (!) from northern Finland, where Taivalkoski is located. I went back to the grocery accounts — yep, “rye” was a frequent purchase for my family.

This lead fizzled, though, when I checked with Kent Randell, former archivist at the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, Michigan. He didn’t doubt the purchase for blood, just that it was unlikely to have been used for soup. Kent then introduced me to Jim Kurtti, former director of the FAHC and current honorary consul to Finland, who gave me a list of books to review. I was in luck — one of Jim’s recommended titles, a translation of ethnologist Ilmar Talve’s “Finnish Folk Culture” — was in the Library’s collections.

I dug into this and came across his discussion of “festive fare.” He mentions that Easter day and the end of Lent were celebrated with blood sausage, called “verimakkara,” a dish that is made around much of the world. In Britain, they call it black pudding. In Latin America, it goes by morcilla. (The blood is gathered when the animal is bled at slaughter.) Variations are endless, but in a typical Finnish recipe, I learned, rye flour, grains and several spices are used to make a sausage. After it was cooked, Finns liked to serve it with lingonberry jam.

Did this hold up for my family history here in the U.S.? The account book noted that Juho bought “Easter eggs” a few days before buying the blood. Easter was, in turn, three days later. It certainly seemed plausible.

In the book “Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal,” author Jennifer McLagan provides some history about blood consumption in Nordic countries. In northern areas where food was scarce, blood provided a practical source of nourishment. Between 1866 and 1868, a famine killed about 8% of Finland’s population. When many people were trying to stay alive by eating pine bark bread, discarding nutrient-rich blood likely felt like throwing away the next meal.

Maybe this is why Finns popularized blood cakes (pancakes) called “veriohukainen.” Blood was the substitute for eggs in the recipe, holding the flour and milk together, while adding a dose of nutritious iron. It also, as you might expect, gave the cakes a dark red color.

It’s widely believed that Finns created this dish, so immigrants certainly didn’t leave it in the old country. In 1914, a Finnish domestic worker named Mina Walli wrote a dual language cookbook designed to teach other Finnish domestics how to cook so that they might increase their wages. “Suomalais-amerikalainen keittokirja” (“Finnish American Cookbook”) went through at least four printings. She included a recipe for blood pancakes.

We can agree it was a different era. There are three recipes on page 140. The first is for “Fried Tripe,” the second is for “Stewed Lungs” and then there’s “Blood Cakes.”

For ingredients, she calls for two cups of blood, two cups of milk, two eggs, ½ of an onion, four tablespoons of suet or butter, four tablespoons of rye flour, four tablespoons of white flour, ½ tablespoon of salt and a dash of thyme.

Then — what, you don’t want to know more?

While consuming blood remains taboo in many cultures who equate blood as the life source of the animal, McLagan writes that early Nordic peoples believed that the strength and other desirable qualities of the animal were transferred through consumption.

Whether such beliefs persisted into the modern era, or whether blood dishes were just a traditional taste of home on foreign shores, the recipes clearly made their way to the U.S. That solved the mystery for me. I closed the little grocery store account books and have decided to donate them to a regional archive, where anyone can access them for research or just out of curiosity. Meanwhile, looking at the photo of Juho, I notice it was taken in daylight, so he couldn’t have been a vampire. However, I don’t know what year the photo was taken, and sunshine as a vampire weakness is fairly recent addition to the folklore cannon, popularized with the 1922 German film “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.”

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Elton John & Bernie Taupin: Rocking the Gershwins

“My gift is my song,” the lyric goes, and on Wednesday night America repaid the writers with the nation’s highest honor for achievement in popular music.

The Library of Congress bestowed its Gershwin Prize for Popular Song on Elton John and Bernie Taupin, the songwriting duo that over 50-plus years conquered the pop music world. They sold some 300 million records and co-wrote dozens of classics — songs whose timeless melodies today simultaneously bring back a now-long-ago era of music and win over new generations of fans.

“Thank you, America, for the music you’ve given us all over the world. It’s an incredible legacy that you have,” John told the audience at Constitution Hall. “All the wonderful blues, jazz, classical music, all the songs the Gershwin Brothers wrote. … I’m so proud to be British and to be here in America to receive this award, because all my heroes were American. … I’m very humbled by tonight.”

Taupin wrote the lyrics, John composed the music and, together, they produced a string of hits that made Elton the biggest, and most outrageously dressed, rock star on the planet. “Your Song,” “Rocket Man,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Daniel,” “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” – the list goes on and on.

Some of the duo’s biggest fans — major stars in their own right — appeared onstage to pay tribute, a thrill for both the audience and the honorees. It’s like an acid trip, John quipped, seeing all these great artists onstage performing his songs.

There were previous Gershwin Prize recipients Garth Brooks and Joni Mitchell. There were ’80s pop diva Annie Lennox and rising country star Maren Morris, heavy metal icons Metallica and modern folkie Brandi Carlile. And there were contemporary popster Charlie Puth, Jacob Lusk of the Gabriels and SistaStrings, who provided support on violin and cello.

Metallica kicked off the performances, blazing through “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” — doubtlessly the heaviest sounds in Gershwin Prize history. After blowing the roof off the place, the band walked offstage to a raucous standing ovation, guitarist James Hetfield and bassist Robert Trujillo tossing guitar picks to members of Congress on their way out.

Brooks gave a tip of his cowboy hat to the honorees, then delivered the plaintive ballad “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” for which, in a reversal of their usual practice, John wrote the music first as well as the stark opening lyrics: “What have I got to do to make you love me? What have I got to do to make you care?”

Mitchell took the stage, supported by Carlile and Lennox on vocals. She has suffered serious health problems in recent years, and on Wednesday turned a high-energy John-Taupin song about living through a romantic breakup into a personal, bluesy statement of perseverance. “I’m still standing better than I ever did, looking like a true survivor,” she sang, tapping her cane in time to the shuffling beat.

But the highlight in an evening filled with them went to the relatively little-known Lusk, who took “Bennie and the Jets” to church and stole the show. Sitting next to the pianist, Lusk preached the gospel of John and Taupin’s brilliant work, then began “Bennie” as a slow-rolling gospel song. Then came the familiar, pumping beat of John’s smash-hit version, Lusk danced his way to the front of the stage, the audience rose to its feet, clapping along and trading shouts of “Bennie” with Lusk, who exited to enormous applause.

As a performer, John paved the way for other rockers with his often-outrageous stage moves and outfits. His career has been a decades-long parade of wild wigs, giant glasses and preposterous feathers, broken by the occasional appearance onstage dressed as Donald Duck or in a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform covered in rhinestones.

The evening’s host, Broadway star Billy Porter, picked up the mantle of flamboyance with a flurry of costume changes — a faux-furry white outfit with silver boots swapped for a fringed black dress with high, high heels. His appearances culminated with a performance of “The Bitch Is Back,” a number John once called, more or less, his “theme song.” Porter began in the audience, detoured by John and Taupin in the front row to sing a few lines with a bared leg propped up on their seats, then finished onstage with a flourish, tossing his jacket to the audience.

Near evening’s end, John took the stage. Seated at a red piano, he performed “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” and “Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)” — the latter derailed by a false start. John laughed and said he’d forgotten what key the song was in, and then kicked back into it.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden then came onstage, along with members of Congress, Madison Council Chairman David M. Rubenstein and the two men of the hour.

“Their music has touched the nation and become part of the American songbook,” said Hayden, who, feeling the spirit earlier in the evening, had donned a pair of Eltonesque glasses. “They gave us ‘Your Song,’ and now we give them the nation’s highest award for influence, impact and achievement in popular music: the Gershwin Prize.”

John and Taupin each gave thanks for the honor and delivered a heartfelt tribute to America, its music and the musicians who inspired them long ago: Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles.

“The only good music that I heard was American music — British music sucked,” John said. “Then, suddenly, I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley, and my whole world changed. Thank God it did.”

Said Taupin: “Pretty much everything that I’ve written emanates from this country. … I have an American heart, an American soul. I have an American family, I have an American wife, I have American children. I am American.”

“But he drives a Volvo,” John deadpanned to laughter.

They also paid tribute to each other, to a songwriting partnership — and a friendship — that changed the course of pop music and, after 57 years, still is going strong.

“Being able to share success with somebody is the greatest thing you can ever have,” John said. “He is some special person; I love him so much.” And, he added, “Without the lyrics, I’d be working in Wal-Mart.”

Hayden asked John and Taupin if they would favor the audience with another number. She had a particular tune in mind: “Your Song,” the ballad that in 1970 became John’s first top 10 hit — a hit that remains one of those songs everybody knows.

They obliged, together in the spotlight on a darkened stage, Taupin leaning on the piano, listening, as John played and sang: “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.”

In return, on Wednesday at Constitution Hall, America offered them its thanks and the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

“Elton John: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song” will be broadcast on PBS stations at 8 p.m. EST on April 8.

Set list

Metallica, “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding”

Annie Lennox, “Border Song”

Garth Brooks, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”

Brandi Carlile, “Madman Across the Water”

Billy Porter, “The Bitch Is Back”

Jacob Lusk, “Bennie and the Jets”

Maren Morris, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”

Charlie Puth, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”

Brandi Carlile, “Skyline Pigeon”

Garth Brooks, “Daniel”

Joni Mitchell, I’m Still Standing”

Elton John, “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”

Elton John, “Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)”

Elton John, “Your Song”

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Florence Klotz: Costume Design & Broadway History

This is a guest post by Mark Eden Horowitz, a music specialist in the Music Division. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The Library’s recently acquired collection of Florence Klotz costume designs are a visual celebration of the art, craft and range of her work.

Many of her shows feature dichotomies of harsh realities and glamorous fantasies, such as in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” where one goes from ragged prisoner garb to the celluloid fantasy of Aurora — the Spider Woman. But however gritty her costumes might get, Klotz undeniably had a magical way with baubles, bangles, beads, rhinestones, sequins, feathers and furs.

In her final show before retirement, the 1994 Broadway revival of “Show Boat” directed by Hal Prince, Klotz designed 585 costumes for 72 actors covering over 30 years of American history. She won her sixth Tony Award for the costumes, more than any previous costume designer.

The Library’s Florence Klotz Collection includes those designs, as well as those for “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “On the Twentieth Century,” “City of Angels,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and many others.

Unlike her costumes, Klotz’s career was not planned or designed; it evolved unexpectedly, as she described it, “mostly through luck.”

Stephen Sondheim and Florence Klotz. Photo: Unknown. Music Division; courtesy of Suzanne DeMarco. 

Her parents owned a millinery store, Klotz Brothers (her father named a cloth pattern after her: Florence plaid). She attended the Parsons School of Design but assumed that, after graduating, she would get married and have a family rather than a career. Instead, she and Ruth Mitchell — who began her career as a stage manager, then worked as an assistant to and ultimately co-producer with Prince — became life partners and a theatrical power couple.

In 1941, Klotz got a call from a friend asking if she would like to “paint some materials” at the Brooks Costume Company. Unbeknownst to Klotz, Brooks was the most famous costume company in the theater world. During and right after World War II, many materials were hard to come by so “ordinary materials were painted to look like whatever cloth was desired.” As it turned out, Klotz had a real knack for it.

One day in 1951, legendary designer Irene Sharaff approached Klotz, asking if she would assist her on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I.” For several years thereafter, Klotz worked as an assistant to virtually all the major designers of the day — Sharaff, Lucinda Ballard, Miles White, Raoul Pene Du Bois, Alvin Colt — on shows such as “Flower Drum Song,” “The Sound of Music,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Silk Stockings.” Ballard eventually nudged a reluctant Klotz into trying her hand as the designer, not an assistant, for shows.

The idea of designing costumes for a Broadway musical alone was daunting, but in 1961 Klotz dipped her toe in, designing the costumes for the Prince-produced, George Abbott-directed play “A Call on Krupin.” (Of course, it was not unusual in those days for a straight play to have a cast of 26.)

For the next few years, Klotz continued to assist on other designers’ shows while increasingly designing for plays on her own. In 1966, again working with Prince, she designed the costumes for her first Broadway musical, “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman.” In 1970, she joined with Prince again on the first film for either: “Something for Everyone,” starring Angela Lansbury and Michael York.

Klotz’s wardrobe sketch for a “Follies” character with a swatch of fabric attached at top right. Artist: Florence Klotz. Music Division, courtesy of Suzanne DeMarco.

But it was the next show that exceeded all expectations and where Klotz’s genius was widely recognized: the 1971 Stephen Sondheim musical “Follies” — a show whose extraordinary, elaborate, clever and gorgeous costumes won Klotz not only accolades and adulation but also her first Tony AwardTwo more Prince/Sondheim collaborations swiftly followed: “A Little Night Music” (a romantic operetta set in turn-of-the-century Sweden) and “Pacific Overtures,” which tracked Western influence on Japan since the Perry expedition landed on Japanese shores in 1853. Klotz won Tonys for each.

Klotz went on to design costumes for Prince’s film of “A Little Night Music,” starring Elizabeth Taylor (with Klotz receiving an Academy Award nomination). Klotz designed the violet cashmere wedding dress for Taylor’s marriage to Sen. John Warner in 1976, and they would work together again in 1981 on the Broadway revival of “The Little Foxes.” When Klotz was awarded the Patricia Zipprodt Award for Innovative Costume Design in 2002, Taylor wrote her a letter to include in the program: “You’re the best, the funniest, the most talented. If only you could have controlled my boobs when I ran.”

Florence Klotz. Photo: Unknown. Music Division, courtesy of Suzanne DeMarco.

Klotz worked on 58 Broadway shows, as an assistant on 26 and the designer on 32. In addition, she designed for opera, ballet (particularly in association with Jerome Robbins) and even “Symphony on Ice” for John Curry, his attempt to legitimize ice dancing as an art form.

The Library’s Klotz Collection includes approximately 2,500 designs, plus hundreds of additional pages of correspondence, notes, photographs and other items. There also are over 40 “Show Bibles” — extraordinary volumes that track every aspect of every costume for a show by performer. The designs themselves range from quick pencil sketches to beautiful hand-painted renderings, often accompanied by fabric swatches and notes.

Looking through the collection, one’s eyes are drawn to the gorgeous designs as works of art. You realize that Klotz was, indeed, an artist.

Then you begin to realize other things, too. She had to be a historian, researching her designs to be appropriate to time, place and situation. She had to be expert in textiles, knowing how each fabric folds, flows, cuts, takes the light, lays, ages and lasts — and how it can be dyed, distressed, appliqued and embellished with sequins, bugle beads, feathers and fur.

She had to be intimate with every aspect of theater: how clothing reveals character (and helps an actor become a character); how it works with sets and props and under lights whose colors change; how costume changes must happen, often at speed, and what will work with dance choreography.

A wardrobe sketch for a “Follies” showgirl includes an illustration of how the clothes will look onstage, a fabric swatch for the material and the costume measurements for the actress. Artist: Florence Klotz. Music Division, courtesy of Suzanne DeMarco.

She also had to be a budgeter, a business manager and a shop manager. The collection includes a three-page working budget for “Pacific Overtures” costumes. The budget has separate columns for materials and construction, using two different companies for the 65 or so costumes the show required. Judging by the document, Klotz apparently was able to negotiate $90,805 down to $81,850.

More than anything, one is awestruck by the extraordinary amount of work involved. Aside from the actual time fitting and constructing the costumes, the collection shows Klotz’s method: how she researched designs, began the design process, came up with significantly different versions of outfits (presumably for the director’s final choice) and created truly ravishing pen-and-ink and watercolor works of art representing them — works that not only show the costume but suggest how it moves, how it will be worn and the character of actor playing the part.

Klotz was a designer of both the conscious and the subconscious, the surface and the hidden. Fortunately, with her collection now at the Library, all is revealed.

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Sandra Day O’Connor Papers Now Open for Research

A major portion of the papers of Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, consisting of approximately 600 containers, opened for research use this week.

Housed in the Manuscript Division, the collection documents the trajectory of O’Connor’s life in politics and law in Arizona and, later, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s first woman justice.

Appointed to the court in 1981, O’Connor served until retiring in early 2006. The case files in the collection document her role as the court’s crucial deciding vote. To varying degrees, they also capture the internal workings of her chambers as well as discussions among her eight peers in determining the constitutionality of the nation’s laws. In addition, the collection chronicles O’Connor’s rise in Arizona state politics as a legislator and judge and her ascension to the national stage.

O’Connor donated her papers to the Library in 1990 and they arrived in installments from 1991 to 2008. The papers join those of more than three dozen other justices and chief justices of the Supreme Court available for research at the Library, including John Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, Hugo Black, Earl Warren, Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens.

While serving more than two decades on the court, O’Connor participated in numerous significant decisions on issues ranging from the First Amendment in Lynch v. Donnelly (1983) and Wallace v. Jaffree (1984) to abortion rights in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1982), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989).

Considered the swing vote on the court, O’Connor was often at the center of many cases when she did not author a majority opinion or dissent.

At this time, the case files and docket sheets are open to researchers through the October 1990 term. Access to cases heard by the court from the 1991 through the 2005 terms remains closed to researchers as long as any justice who participated in the decision of a case continues to serve on the Supreme Court.

Other material open to researchers from her tenure as a justice includes correspondence, administrative files relating to her nomination, speeches and writings by O’Connor. Also open for research are files relating to her political and judicial career in Arizona, book manuscripts and other writings and selected family papers.

O’Connor was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1930. Growing up in Arizona, O’Connor attended Stanford University for both undergraduate and law school. After law school, she served as the first deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California, then as assistant attorney general for the state of Arizona. She entered politics as a state legislator, rising to the position of majority leader in the Arizona state senate.

After retiring from the state senate, O’Connor was appointed to Arizona’s superior and appellate courts. President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1981.

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Crime Classics: Richard Harding Davis Gets Lost “In the Fog”

This is a guest post by Zach Klitzman, a writer-editor in the Library’s Publishing Office .

A dashing explorer returned from an African expedition. A fabulously wealthy and fabulously beautiful princess. A jealous younger brother, angling for the family fortune. Smoky rooms in social clubs. Jewel thieves on trains. And the foggy streets of Victorian London.

These elements form the backbone of “In the Fog,” the latest Library of Congress Crime Classic. This 1901 novella is by Richard Harding Davis, the influential war correspondent, author and playwright. He might be largely forgotten now, but Davis was a Renaissance man of his era, as renowned for his battlefield escapades, famous friends and good looks as he was for his literary and journalistic success.

Davis starts off “Fog” with a framing device: A member of Parliament is enjoying an evening in an exclusive club in London as fellow members regale him with three interweaving tales of murder, robbery and betrayal. Davis also uses a familiar trope of the era — London draped in darkness and fog — to kick things into gear. The first story begins when its narrator, an American naval attaché to Britain, stumbles upon a murder after getting lost one foggy night.

This mysterious atmosphere appeared widely in late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction, series editor Leslie Klinger writes in the introduction. Heavyweights such as Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker often invoked London’s fog and smoke to signify danger, mystery and foreboding. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, has his famous detective observe that the city’s fog could be so engulfing that “the thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.”

Richard Harding Davis, ca. 1901, the year “In the Fog” was published. Photo: Burr MacIntosh Studio. Prints and Photographs Division.

Davis knew this sort of fog firsthand. In 1897, after leaving a Christmas party with the renowned actress Ethel Barrymore (the great-aunt of Drew Barrymore), Davis remembered that “we rode straight into a bank of fog that makes those on the fishing banks look like Spring sunshine. You could not see the houses, nor the street, nor the horse, not even his tail.” After a memorable encounter with an unexpecting family who believed Barrymore and Davis to be minor royalty, they returned home safe and sound.

Clearly, the episode stirred Davis to imagine a more violent fog-bound incident for the opening of “Fog.”

In fact, many of Davis’ fictional works were inspired by his personal experiences as a journalist abroad. His novel “The Princess Aline,” about an American artist who goes to Europe after falling in love with a portrait of the titular princess, was based on his own infatuation with the empress of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna. Many of his other books — including “Soldiers of Fortune,” “The King’s Jackal,” “Captain Macklin” and “The White Mice” — were based on his travels.

“The Princess Aline,” 1895. Aline was based on the empress of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna. Artwork: Charles Dana Gibson. Prints and Photographs Division.

Davis specialized in war coverage, including the Boer War in modern-day South Africa, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I. He counted Theodore Roosevelt as a friend and rode with TR’s Rough Riders in Cuba — even becoming an honorary member after rescuing wounded soldiers during a raid.

Davis posing with Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Publisher: Strohmeyer & Wyman. Prints and Photographs Division.

His journalistic and literary fame led him to the top ranks of celebrity; he befriended Charles Dana Gibson, the illustrator who created the “Gibson Girl” drawings that were the turn-of-the-century paradigm for female beauty. (Gibson later used Harding’s clean-shaven good looks as inspiration for his “Gibson Man” ideal.)

Gibson, a groomsman in Davis’ wedding party, also illustrated several of the writer’s works, including the 1891 story collection “Gallegher and Other Stories.” The title story from that collection, about a newspaper office boy in Philadelphia, is also included in “Fog,” showing that Davis could spin a good yarn set on both sides of the Atlantic.

Harding died of a heart attack in upstate New York in 1916, when he was just 51. He had recently returned from the eastern front in Greece during World War I.

“In the death of Richard Harding Davis, the commonwealth of letters has lost its most picturesque and romantic citizen,” the New York Times Review of Books wrote in a posthumous review of his work.

Though his name has faded in popular culture, his adventures in Central America, Cuba, Europe and Asia — not to mention his tale of mystery in foggy London — live on in his many articles, books, plays and film adaptations.

Library of Congress Crime Classics are published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the Library. “In the Fog” is available in softcover ($16.99) from booksellers worldwide, including the Library of Congress shop.

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My Job: Kathy Woodrell

For three decades, Kathy Woodrell helped bring the Library’s decorative arts collections to light. She recently retired. This story also appears in the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Describe your work at the Library.

I served as the decorative arts and architecture reference specialist for the General and International Collections. I responded to thousands of questions in person and virtually, identified new resources to enhance the collections and presented many programs and events. I often gave art and architecture tours of the historic Main Reading Room; it was an honor to provide service in this magnificent space.

The decorative arts encompass the history and study of the design and decoration of utilitarian items, including furniture, glass, wood, metal, ceramics, costume, clothing, textiles and crafts. A yearlong special assignment in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division enhanced my knowledge of antiquarian books and encouraged me to recommend decorative arts works for that collection.

Identifying a cherished family object, reuniting childhood pen pals, collaborating with the incredibly knowledgeable staff and mining the expansive collections were incredibly satisfying. I retired from my dream job in 2023 with 34 years of public service at the Library.

How did you prepare for your job?

I was exposed early to architecture, antiques and textiles. My great-grandmother had me quilting at 6 and sewing clothes by 12. My grandmother, an antiques dealer, taught me to look at objects and ask: “What is it, who made it and what do you think it’s worth?” My mother’s distaste for antiques and love of modernism also informed my design aesthetic.

I was raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s only “skyscraper,” the Price Tower. Its unorthodox angles, textiles and furnishings fueled my childhood imagination.

I hold a Bachelor of Science degree and a master’s in library science.

What were some of your standout projects at the Library?

I participated in many collaborative displays, tours and presentations on topics including Civil War fashion, Georg Jensen jewelry and modernist furniture. Some coincided with exhibitions at local museums; others featured authors and collectors.

I worked closely with students and faculty in the Smithsonian’s decorative arts and design history master’s degree program for 24 years, assisting with thesis research and advising emerging scholars how to effectively mine the Library’s rich resources.

During the AIDS crisis, I helped make a quilt panel for the NAMES Project to memorialize Library employees who had succumbed. I was honored to teach staff how to sew the name of a beloved person onto the panel.

What are some of your favorite collection items?

The Library’s collections of early journals, magazines and pattern books from the 19th century forward are extensive and invaluable. I adore a small 17th-century book of Psalms with exquisite silk embroidery and seed pearls in Rare Book’s Rosenwald Collection.

Favorite items I added to the Rare Book collections include: a resist-dye pattern book with pages dyed in indigo (1791-1822); a two-volume set of embroidery patterns, each with a silk-worked sampler (1795-1798); a unique work with diagrams and suggestions for improving the Jacquard loom, with fold-out patterns and silk samples (1839); a four-volume set of 600-plus original textile designs from a Parisian design firm (1848-1852); and so many more!

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