Library of Congress's Blog, page 170

Inside the March on Washington: Moving On

(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist in the American Folklife Center and the Library’s project director of the Civil Rights History Project, and Kate Stewart, processing archivist in the American Folklife Center, who is principally responsible for organizing and making available collections with Civil Rights content in the division to researchers and the public.)

For sisters Dorie and Joyce Ann Ladner, the highs of witnessing the flood of people on the National Mall, the celebrities, the media presence and the speeches on the Lincoln Memorial steps were short-lived. The aftermath of the March on Washington for the Ladners and fellow activists in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and other groups meant a return to confront racism in the increasingly tense and violent front-line communities in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and other southern states. If the activists were “under siege” before the march, the tension in the places where they organized only intensified afterwards.

In listening to insiders’ perspectives on the March on Washington in 1963 and considering subsequent historical developments, the gathering appears to have provided an important, but only momentary, pause in the deepening conflicts in much of the nation. Across all sectors of society, anxiety was rising over the pace and the form of social change that was unfolding. The days, months and years after August 1963 in America saw a parade of events – horrific as well hopeful – that raised fundamental questions about the character of American society, the legitimacy of the political structure and the precarious prospects for orderly change.

A brief snapshot of such symptomatic moments over the course of just five years would have to include John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963; the murder of “Freedom Summer” student volunteers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in June 1964; passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964; the “Bloody Sunday” march in 1965; the murder of civil rights worker Jonathan Daniels in 1965; the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965; and the murders of Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy in June of that same year.

In the first excerpt in this video, drawn from the Civil Rights History Project, the Ladners remember the energy dedicated to planning and pulling off the march was almost immediately overwhelmed by the horror of the murder of four school girls in the bombing of Sixth Street Baptist Church Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. This happened on Sept. 15, 1963, only a little over two weeks after the march’s culmination, and the Ladners recall the moment of contradiction between being at the march one minute and attending the funeral of the school girls the next.

In the final video excerpt in this series on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, we draw on an interview with the Rev. Benjamin Lowery from the National Visionary Leadership Project Collection. Lowery, a close friend of Martin Luther King and a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, reflects on King’s pragmatic goals and worldly ideas for achieving fundamental transformations in American society. Lowery notes that King’s vision of achieving economic self-sufficiency and political equality for all Americans was aligned with an anti-militaristic stance and that these aspirations have become obscured by the focus on the “dream” that has come to define the man.

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This blog series accompanies the Library’s photo exhibition, “The March on Washington: A Day Like No Other,” which is on view at the Library though Saturday, March 1, 2014.

The Reward of Courage

Picture this: The battle of good versus evil set against the backdrop of early 19th century America, where the coming together of two young lovers is threatened by the mistaken belief of an inheritable disease that would afflict their future children. Charlatans who promise quack cures in place of scientific medicine are pitted against the U.S. postal authorities, who crack down on such fraudulent and dangerous claims.

Miss Keene, the nurse at Dr. Dale’s clinic, examines Anna Flint. This is probably the first cinematic representation of a breast examination for cancer.

Sounds like a period science fiction thriller, right? In 1921, the American Society for the Control of Cancer (the ASCC, later renamed the American Cancer Society) produced and the Rockefeller Foundation funded the melodrama “The Reward of Courage.”

The film calls for the establishment of clinics in industrial workplaces to promote worker health and higher productivity, and provides what is likely the first representation in film of a breast examination for cancer.

The Library of Congress acquired the original nitrate print of “The Reward of Courage” in 1998 from the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia (NFSA) as part of an ongoing partnership to repatriate American titles in the NFSA collections.

Today, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) announced the digital release of both the original version of “The Reward of Courage” and the newly scored version, on the NLM’s Medical Movies on the Web, a curated portal featuring selected motion pictures from the NLM’s world-renowned collection of over 30,000 audiovisual titles.

You can watch both the original silent version and the newly scored version of the film on NLM’s YouTube channel.

Part of the animated section of the film shows the spread of cancer and its consequences, highlighted by arrows. The line drawing of the human figure and dark blotches of the tumors also serve to counter the prospect of any paralyzing fear or disgust that might be evoked by a live action image of tumors.

Working with the Library of Congress Moving Image reference staff, NLM discovered the unpreserved and unstable nitrate print in the Library’s collections while doing research on medical films and, in 2006, received a grant to preserve the film. Library of Congress staff at its Motion Picture Conservation Center in Dayton, Ohio pulled the 1,750-foot 35mm reel to make a thorough examination of each frame for repair and cleaning. The film was then sent to Colorlab in Rockville, Md., for the rest of the preservation work, as the original nitrate print was tinted and the Library does not preserve color film, explained Mike Mashon, head of the Library’s Moving Image Section. In exchange for loaning its material, the Library received both a new 35mm safety preservation negative and a tinted safety access print.

“`It’s a fascinating early example in the use of motion pictures to educate moviegoers about public health issues, in this case using a framing narrative of a young couple who fear that their children will inherit a familial predisposition to cancer,” said Mashon. “The Library has thousands of these types of educational films in its collections, films that provide invaluable and vivid examples of the ways in which films have from the very beginning of cinema been used to teach, persuade, cajole, sell and indoctrinate the American public.”

Because of neglect and deterioration over time, more than 80 percent of U.S. movies from the silent era no longer exist in the United States. The Library maintains the largest collection of American films on nitrate film stock in the world, and continues to work with foreign archives to return domestically made films to the United States.

 

Imagination and Invention

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” – Thomas Edison

John Fitch’s sketch and description of piston for steamboat propulsion, ca. 1795. Manuscript Division.

In August 1795, John Fitch not only demonstrated the first successful steamboat but was also granted a United States patent for his invention. A century later, on Aug. 12, 1877, Thomas Alva Edison is believed to have completed the model for the first phonograph, a device that recorded sound onto tinfoil cylinders. Twenty years later, on Aug. 31, the inventor, often referred to as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” received a patent for the kinetoscope, the forerunner of the motion picture film projector. With the month proving to be a notable one in our nation’s invention history, it is quite appropriate that August is National Inventor’s Month.

Thomas Edison listening to a new record. 1906. Prints and Photographs Division.

Created in 1995 by the United Inventors Association of the USA (UIA-USA), the Academy of Applied Science and Inventors’ Digest, this annual commemoration aims to guide up-and-coming inventors, young and old, on the processes of product development, inspire creativity and innovation, and promote the positive image of inventors and their contributions. The Library of Congress could be considered an avid supporter, with its American Memory Edison collection titled “Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies.” The presentation contains surviving products of Edison’s entertainment inventions and industries, including motion pictures, disc sound recordings, and other related materials, such as photographs and original magazine articles. In addition, histories are given of Edison’s involvement with motion pictures and sound recordings, as well as a special feature focusing on the life of the great inventor.

An interesting side note, according to “Washington D.C. Museums: 2013 Video and Social Media Rankings” – a report on 42 District-area cultural institutions put together by arts and culture blog ItsNewsToYou.me – the top-viewed D.C. museum video (329,000 views) is “Edison’s Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze.” “The Sneeze” was one of the inventor’s first motion pictures and captures Edison employee Fred Ott, who was known to his fellow workers for his comic sneezing and other gags. The Library received it as a copyright deposit on Jan. 9, 1894. “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze” is also the earliest extant copyrighted motion picture in the Library of Congress collections.

 

Inside the March on Washington: Speaking Truth to Power

(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist in the American Folklife Center and the Library’s Project Director of the Civil Rights History Project, a Congressionally mandated documentation initiative that is being carried out in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.)

Photographer James K. W. Atherton, UPI, White House News Photographers Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 gained mythic status at virtually the moment it was delivered, and its aura has only increased over the years. By virtue of its having been added to the Library’s National Recording Registry in 2002, it is also officially a national treasure, taking its place alongside the recordings of Robert Johnson, Cole Porter, Marian Anderson, the Fisk Jubilee Singers and dozens of other unique American voices.

In this interview from the Civil Rights History Project Collection, Clarence Jones speaks with David Cline of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Oral History Program about drafting the famous speech. Jones, King’s speech writer and adviser, recalls in vivid detail the moment at which King departed from the draft to include, without any prior warning, the “I Have a Dream” portion of the speech. We also hear an excerpt from Rev. Joseph Lowery in an interview for the National Visionary Leadership Project Collection. Lowery, a confidante and colleague of King, reminisces about the enduring power of the speech in the wider context of the place and time in which it was delivered.

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Aspects of the speech still provoke debate on a number of fronts. One line of thought is that the focus by audiences and commentators on the “dream” portion of the speech and its message of tolerance and inclusiveness diverts attention from King’s pointed criticism of the government’s neglect of its African American citizens. There is little ambiguity in this and similar other lines in the first part of the speech: “America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” King also delivers an explicit warning that the march is just the first challenge to the status quo: “Those who hope that the colored Americans needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.”

Other important figures in the movement who were on the stage with King delivered eloquent addresses of their own, including A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Walter Reuther, the noted labor leader. In this next clip, we highlight a speech that was not given at the march, or rather a speech that had to be changed at the last minute because of the storm of controversy it caused on the podium. This was SNCC chairman John Lewis’s impassioned delivery in which he directly confronted the Kennedy administration for its lack of commitment to enforcing civil rights law and particularly Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department for its refusal to pursue and prosecute racist assaults on activists and black Southerners. The original speech, written by a committee of SNCC activists, included the rhetorical question, “I want to know, which side is the federal government on?” Another dramatic line in the speech was this: “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently.”

Patrick O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington and a Kennedy administration supporter and speaker that day, along with others in the coalition of unions and religious and civic leaders, threatened to withdraw from the march if changes weren’t made to the speech. The SNCC group that was attending the march initially resisted but was finally persuaded by A. Philip Randolph to make changes to the speech for the sake of march unity. But the episode still rankles SNCC members today, as both Courtland Cox and Joyce Ann Ladner attest in these interview excerpts from the Civil Rights History Project Collection.

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Both speeches are available for research by making an appointment with the staff of the Manuscript Division in the Library of Congress. This post is the fourth in a series that provides audiences with the perspectives and memories of organizers about the march through video and audio interviews in the collections of the American Folklife Center. The series accompanies the Library exhibition, “The March on Washington: A Day Like No Other,” which opens today. You can read more about the exhibition in this blog post from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.

Inside the March on Washington: “Our Support Really Ran Deep”

(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist in the American Folklife Center and the Library’s Project Director of the Civil Rights History Project, a Congressionally mandated documentation initiative that is being carried out in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.)

March on Washington crowd at the Reflecting Pool. Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos. Prints and Photographs Division.

Fifty years later, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom triggers different memories for participants and observers.  It is safe to say that for most who witnessed it, in person or at home, the lasting images of the march are celebratory and triumphant. Popular accounts in the media reinforce those memories by centering on the determined and proud faces of thousands of ordinary people gathered peacefully in the nation’s capital to demand that the country live up to its founding principles of justice and equality. Similarly, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has become part of our collective consciousness, given the frequency with which it has been quoted, cited and replayed over the last 50 years.

Behind the scenes, organizers of the march and other notable figures in the movement experienced a complex range of emotions and confronted questions that became ever more pressing as the months and weeks leading up to the march dwindled to hours and minutes.  Apprehension and nervousness were present and so too were elation and euphoria. Mostly hidden from public view were the tensions among and between the coalition of civic and religious leaders and front-line activists as to how the march could advance their goals and meet their demands for social change and justice.

This is the third in a series of posts that provides audiences with the perspectives and memories of organizers about the march through video and audio interviews in the collections of the American Folklife Center.  The series accompanies the Library’s photo exhibition, “The March on Washington: A Day Like No Other,” opening on Wednesday, Aug., 28, 2013.

In the first clip, edited from interviews in the National Visionary Leadership Project collection, we hear the recollections of Rev. Joseph Lowery and Constance Baker Motley. Lowery was a Methodist minister in Mobile, Ala., when he became a civil rights activist in the 1950s.  Along with King and other ministers, he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a leading civil rights organization. Lowery recalls the unease and uncertainty that he and other organizers felt before the march and their relief upon its peaceful conclusion.

Constance Baker Motley grew up in Connecticut and became a civil rights lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund. She worked with Justice Thurgood Marshall and other lawyers to argue cases at the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education. She also traveled extensively across the country to meet with plaintiffs, gather evidence and work on local cases of civil rights abuses. In this interview, she reflects on the astonishment of movement leaders at the outpouring of feeling and involvement of so many “ordinary people” who participated in the march.

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In the second clip, drawn from the Civil Rights History Project Collection, sisters Joyce Ann and Dorie Ladner reminisce about the events of August 28. The Ladners helped plan the march at its New York headquarters as representatives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”), a national coalition of college-age activists, and were on the stage at the Lincoln Memorial for the march. For them, the days started off with a protest at the Justice Department over the case of colleagues in Americus, Ga., who had been jailed, weeks earlier, on false charges of sedition. The charges against SNCC’s Don Harris, John Perdew and Ralph Allen, and Congress of Racial Equality activist Zev Aelony carried a maximum sentence of death and SNCC chairman John Lewis’s speech later that day at the March criticized the Kennedy administration’s refusal to intervene in this and other deadly assaults on civil rights workers and community members in the South.  Joyce Ann Ladner recalls the overwhelming numbers of marchers and also the presence of several notable figures on the stage such as Marlon Brando and Lena Horne.




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These brief excerpts represent only a small sample of the documentation of the civil rights movement available at the American Folklife Center and other divisions in the Library of Congress.

 

March on Washington Riches at the Library of Congress

Celebrants observing the 50thanniversary of the March on Washington should not miss special displays of artifacts, treasures and a talk by Congressman John Lewis on Wednesday, Aug. 28, all at the Library of Congress and all free and open to the public.

March on Washington organizer
Bayard Rustin

Opening that day is the Library’s photo exhibition, “A Day Like No Other, Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington” featuring photos of the 1963 march by photographers including Leonard Freed, ‘Flip’ Schulke, Danny Lyon and Roosevelt Carter. That exhibition will be open from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. in the Graphic Arts Galleries on the ground floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., directly east of the U.S. Capitol building.  Curators will be on hand to enhance the viewing experience, and Brigitte Freed, the widow of featured photographer Leonard Freed, will also be on hand for this exhibition opening.

Also on Wednesday, Aug. 28, several other special activities are planned:

A talk by Congressman Lewis at 10 a.m. in the Library’s Great Hall on the first floor of the Jefferson Building;
A special display, from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., of unique treasures from the Library’s collections related to the March on Washington, in the foyer of the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on the ground floor of the Jefferson Building. These will include a copy submitted for copyright registration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and manuscripts and photos related to iconic participants’ roles in the march;
Additional photos, legal materials, audiovisual displays and music of the day in the Library’s ground-floor Whittall Pavilion, plus a guest book for visitors to sign.  Those who do will receive a button that is a reproduction of a button worn by participants in the 1963 march;
A noon panel discussion in Dining Room A on the 6th floor of the Library’s James Madison Building at 101 Independence Ave. S.E. (just south of the Jefferson Building) about March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin. This talk is cosponsored by the Library’s Daniel A.P. Murray Association, and the Library’s chapters of Blacks in Government (BIG) and GLOBE, a staff group representing a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender membership.

The Library of Congress holds a great wealth of research material pertaining to the African-American experience.  Among its holdings are the NAACP Records, which are the largest single manuscript collection at the Library, and the most-accessed; the papers of such activists as Roy Wilkins, Moorfield Storey, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Joseph Rauh, Mary Church Terrell, Jackie Robinson and Thurgood Marshall; and the papers of James Forman, Herbert Hill and Tom Kahn.

 

 

 

Inside the March on Washington: Bayard Rustin’s “Army”

(The following is a guest post by Kate Stewart, processing archivist in the American Folklife Center, who is principally responsible for organizing and making available collections with Civil Rights content in the division to researchers and the public.)

(left to right) Bayard Rustin, deputy director, and Cleveland Robinson, chairman of Administrative Committee, March on Washington. Orlando Fernandez, World Telegram & Sun photo. Prints and Photographs Division.

The planning and execution of the March on Washington in 1963 stands as an extraordinary testament to the vision, political strategy and determination of several organizations and key individuals, chief among them A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who had conceived of just such an event as far back as the 1940s. By the summer of 1963, the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, an umbrella group of member organizations including the SCLC, the NAACP, the National Urban League and SNCC, among others, had come together to raise funds to support the day-to-day work of Rustin and his production crew, consisting of dozens of college students.

Typically, it is the voices of leaders of the groups within the council – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young – that figure prominently in many accounts of the march. By contrast, this second post in a series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington focuses on the experiences of individuals who worked behind the scenes to plan and carry out a feat of logistics, imagination and organization that made the march an indelible memory for both those who participated in it and others who witnessed it on television around the nation and the world.  In these two interviews from collections in the American Folklife Center, Rachelle Horowitz and Joyce Ladner describe their work at the march headquarters in Harlem in the summer of 1963.  Both remember the long hours and hard work it took to plan the march in the course of eight weeks, and both talk about the mentorship of Bayard Rustin, for whom they worked that summer.

Rustin’s central role in shaping the philosophy of the movement and organizing many of the key direct actions that gave the movement public prominence was indisputable.  By the summer of 1963, he had already planned and carried out the Prayer Pilgrimage in 1957 with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), as well as two marches in 1958 and 1959 called the Youth March for Integrated Schools. All three of these events were precursors to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the summer of 1963.

Rachelle Horowitz was a student at Brooklyn College in the late 1950s when she became involved in the Civil Rights Movement.  She started volunteering with a little-known organization called In Friendship in Manhattan with Rustin and Ella Baker, another civil rights icon, and subsequently, at age 22, became the march’s transportation coordinator.  In this 2003 interview with Megan Rosenfeld for the Voices of Civil Rights Project Collection, Horowitz discusses how Rustin led the planning of the march in 1963 at the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, along with A. Philip Randolph.  Despite initial opposition from the Kennedy administration and other politicians, Rustin and Randolph convinced them to approve the march. Horowitz then talks about the challenge of chartering buses and planning the logistics of moving thousands of people in and out of the city in August 1963.

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Sisters Joyce and Dorie Ladner grew up in Mississippi and became civil rights activists as teenagers in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While attending Tougaloo College, Joyce joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, often pronounced “snick”), a group founded in 1960 by students involved in sit-ins, protests and other forms of nonviolent direct action.  In the summer of 1963, Joyce went to New York as a representative of SNCC to help plan the march along with her sister, Dorie.  Joyce worked as a fundraiser with Rustin, Rachelle Horowitz and Eleanor Holmes (now Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton).  The two sisters lived with Horowitz and Holmes for the summer. In this anecdote from an interview conducted by UNC’s Southern Oral History program for the Civil Rights History Project Collection, Joyce remembers long hours, hard work and “Bobby” Dylan hanging out in their apartment and playing guitar late into the night when the residents only wanted to go to sleep.




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The Library of Congress exhibition “A Day Like No Other: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington”  opens on Aug. 28. You can read the first post of the “Inside the March on Washington” blog series here.

“West Side Story” Redux

“West Side Story,” 1958. Printed by Artcraft Litho. & Ptg. Co. Inc. Prints and Photographs Division.

On August 19, 1957, “West Side Story” began its pre-Broadway tour at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. About a month later, it opened on Broadway, changing the nature of the American musical and challenging the country’s view of itself. The show dealt seriously with violence, adolescent gangs and racial prejudice—themes rarely included in musicals—and ended with one of the show’s leads dead on stage. The integration of music, dance and script, as well as the theatricality of the staging were a revelation to audiences.

The musical’s success must be credited primarily to its creators. Composer Leonard Bernstein created his most memorable score—complex, passionate, tuneful, shocking and bursting with rhythmic energy. Jerome Robbins, credited with conceiving the show, doubled as director and choreographer. Lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in his first Broadway musical, exhibited the wit, intelligence and craft that would make him the pre-eminent songwriter of his generation. Arthur Laurents staged the adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in contemporary Manhattan with a lean, concise libretto, which allowed for the integration of language, music, dance and movement. All of these elements came together to create a groundbreaking musical.

If you missed the opening by a few decades, you can still see the online exhibit. “West Side Story: Birth of a Classic,” drawn mostly from the Library’s extensive Leonard Bernstein Collection, offers a rare view into the creative process and collaboration involved in the making of this extraordinary production. Included in the exhibition are unique items such as an early synopsis and outline of the script; Bernstein’s annotated copy of “Romeo and Juliet”; choreographic notes from Robbins; two original watercolor set designs by Oliver Smith; original music manuscripts; a facsimile of a Sondheim lyric sketch for the song “Somewhere”; and amusing opening-night telegrams from celebrities such as Lauren Bacall, Cole Porter and Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Also included are notes that reveal actors who auditioned, such as Jerry Orbach and Warren Beatty, who was described as “good voice—can’t open his jaw—charming as hell—clean cut.” As an added bonus, the Library has the very first prints made of several never-before-seen production photographs taken for Look magazine for a feature spread that never ran.

The composer, conductor, writer and teacher Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was one of 20th-century America’s most important musical figures. The Leonard Bernstein Collection is one of the largest and most varied of the many special collections held by the Library’s Music Division. Its more than 400,000 items, including music and literary manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, audio and video recordings, fan mail and other types of materials extensively document Bernstein’s extraordinary life and career.

 

Inquiring Minds: Alan Lomax Goes North

(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist with the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.)

A fall landscape of orange and red foliage rushes by a car winding down a long road…a stern-faced singer draws his bow across a single-stringed lute and sings a ballad in Serbian about the 1389 Battle of Kosovo… an elderly couple softly recite Finnish hymns in the parlor of their home…a man and woman trade French song verses in call and response style by the fading light of day.

These sounds and images are only a few of the astonishing range of roots music and cultural communities in the American Upper Midwest that were recorded 75 years ago this week for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax, legendary folk song collector and then assistant in charge of the Library’s Archive of Folk Song.  It is just as eye-opening that the 23-year-old Lomax set out on his pioneering tour of Michigan, the “most fertile source” for folk songs in the summer and fall of 1938, alone in a Library car. He had with him little else but his recording kit, which consisted of an instantaneous disk cutting machine, dozens of blank disks and remarkably, a 16mm film camera.  He returned to Washington after three months on the road with nearly a thousand recorded songs and several hundred feet of motion picture images (sadly, several rolls of film were stolen on a stop during the expedition and never recovered).

Now, on the 75th anniversary of that trip, the American Folklife Center, which houses the Alan Lomax Collection, and several institutions are jointly commemorating the journey. The two film clips below are excerpted from a longer documentary that, together with my colleague, Jim Leary, University of Wisconsin folklorist and noted cultural historian of the region,  I produced and edited for the Library of Congress.  The documentary marries the all-too-brief silent film footage that Lomax shot to audio disk recordings of the same performers; the microphone can clearly be seen in the shot on several occasions.  But, given the absence of any recording logs or other notation about the filming and what music was being played at that exact moment, the choice of the audio track that I joined to the picture is based solely on reasonable conjecture, decided upon by Leary.  On several instances, I slowed the film frame rate severely in the digital editing system to accommodate a few more seconds of audio. Jim Leary is also producing a set of archival recordings of the region’s musical communities culled from the Library’s Lomax collection that will include more than 40 full-length tracks from Lomax’s 1938 trip.

In this first clip, Lomax filmed the Floriani family, a Croatian tamburitza group that also played more popular styles of music, in the front yard of their home in Ameek, Mich. It is a town in the “Copper Country,” which is a reference to mining, the main industry in that part of the state.  There are several shots of a mine in the first part of the clip under which the song “31st Level Blues” is playing.  It is about mine work – “31st level” refers to the depths that miners have to descend to do their jobs – and the lyrics amplify the hard toil and weariness of the occupation and the antagonism that characterized relations between mine workers and bosses.  The second song highlights the group’s facility as tamburitza performers and the track used here is a traditional Croatian ballad, “Majko Moje” (My Mother)

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The second clip features Mose and Exilia Bellaire, French-Canadian residents of Hancock, Mich., singing “Dites moi pourquoi un?”  It is a version of “The Carol of the Twelve Numbers,” which has been documented throughout Europe and North America as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.





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The 75th anniversary projects also include a series of podcasts produced by the Library, a potential e-book, “Michigan-I-O,” slated to be published by Dust to Digital Records, as well as public programming consisting of lectures and concerts, a traveling exhibition, and the dissemination of recordings to the communities in Michigan. In addition to the Library, participants in the projects include the Michigan State University Museum, Michigan Council for the Humanities, the Great Lakes Traditions Endowment; the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Culture at the University of Wisconsin, the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), and the Finlandia Foundation.

Keep an ear and an eye out for more such performances in the days and weeks ahead, drawn from the American Foklife Center’s Archive.

A (Married) Life at the Opera

It’s a fair thing to say that classical music, and more specifically opera, is what brought me and my husband together.  We met while working at The Denver Post, but our first date – seeing Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at Opera

An early “Don Giovanni,” dubbed “a playful drama in two acts”

Colorado – may have been a sort of test. He didn’t want to marry anyone who wasn’t into opera, and I wanted someone who wouldn’t squirm at the sound of “squeaky violins and tinkly pianos,” as one of my ex-boyfriends once described classical.

We’ve seen symphonies, chamber-music concerts and yes, operas in our quarter-century together.  Mostly operas.  Shortly after we moved to the Washington, D.C. area I got him season tickets for opera as a birthday present. We just kept going.  It’s been wonderful!

We’ve seen — no pun intended — scores of operas, including multiple bites at my two favorites, Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”  And the exhibition “A Night at the Opera” that the Library of Congress is opening today will probably get visited, repeatedly, by my spouse because it’s heavy on items by his two favorite opera composers: Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, both of whom are observing 200th-birthday celebrations this year.

If opera gets inside your head – even at the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd level – you’ll really enjoy this exhibition.  It displays several manuscripts in the composers’ own hand – one from Verdi’s opera “Attila” and another from Wagner’s “Walküren” (The Valkyrie); a third from Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” and letters — from Berg to fellow composer Schoenberg and from Puccini to Alfredo Vandini.  It can inspire awe to be  a few inches away from something these greats actually touched.

And the exhibition  features programs and the stage manager’s original score from George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” from the Library’s unparalleled Gershwin collection.

There are also many beautiful visuals: first editions of opera scores (including a 1787 piano-vocal score from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and the full score from Wagner’s “Lohengrin”) and photos of some of opera’s greatest stars through history, from Enrico Caruso (as Radamés in “Aida”) to Lauritz Melchior (as Lohengrin) to Marian Anderson as Ulrica in “Ballo”) to Lily Pons as Lakmé and Alexander Kipnis as the title character in “Boris Godunov.”

Speaking of Boris, there is a wonderful wall-size rendition of the coronation scene from “Boris”  and there are gorgeous set designs, in watercolor, by Oliver Smith for his 1960s productions of “Carmen” and “Don Giovanni.”  The exhibit also features the original Galileo Chini set design for Puccini’s “Turandot” from 1926.

The Library of Congress has superb music collections, and this exhibition brings forward the cream of its huge opera holdings.  Don’t miss it!