Podcasts about arts national heritage fellowship

We shine the light on CAC Co-Founder and Vice President Dolly Jacobs. Dolly was born into circus royalty – her father was Lou Jacobs, the legendary clown for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus® and her mother was a model in New York, who quickly transformed her career to become a circus artist as well. She is the first circus artist to ever receive the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship and is known world-wide as the “Queen of the Air.”

We shine the light on CAC Co-Founder and Vice President Dolly Jacobs. Dolly was born into circus royalty – her father was Lou Jacobs, the legendary clown for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus® and her mother was a model in New York, who quickly transformed her career to become a circus artist as well. She is the first circus artist to ever receive the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship and is known world-wide as the “Queen of the Air.”

It's easy to fall under the spell of Norman Kennedy as he shares stories of the old ways of spinning and weaving, which he learned from some of the last practitioners of their crafts. Growing up in Scotland, Norman was fascinated by the stories that the older spinners and weavers told—and even as they thought he was crazy to want to learn, they gladly explained what they knew: how to make durable cloth efficiently as part of a life of hard work. While he picked up textile knowledge, Norman also picked up songs in many languages. Spinners and weavers may claim him as our own, but Norman's first visit to the United States came in 1965, when he sang at the Newport Folk Festival (the same year that Bob Dylan scandalized the crowd by plugging in an electric guitar). Returning to the United States the next year, he continued to sing while eventually serving as Master Weaver at Colonial Williamsburg. In the 1970s, he moved to northern Vermont and founded the Marshfield School of Weaving. The school continues to teach traditional spinning and weaving techniques and houses the largest collection of working 18th and 19th century looms in the United States. Norman has taught classes, given concerts, and led waulkings around the world. In 2003, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, which is the United States' highest honor for folk and traditional arts.

We shine the light on CAC Co-Founder and Vice President Dolly Jacobs. Dolly was born into circus royalty – her father was Lou Jacobs, the legendary clown for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus® and her mother was a model in New York, who quickly transformed her career to become a circus artist as well. She is the first circus artist to ever receive the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship and is known world-wide as the “Queen of the Air.”

We shine the light on CAC Co-Founder and Vice President Dolly Jacobs. Dolly was born into circus royalty – her father was Lou Jacobs, the legendary clown for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus® and her mother was a model in New York, who quickly transformed her career to become a circus artist as well. She is the first circus artist to ever receive the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship and is known world-wide as the “Queen of the Air.”

DOYLE LAWSON & QUICKSILVER are legendary in the Bluegrass genre. With nearly 40 albums to their credit, they have multiple Grammy, Dove, ICM, IBMA and SPBGMA Award nominations, and are 7-time winners of IBMA�s Vocal Group of the Year. Doyle was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2012 and received the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship award in 2006 for his contributions to cultural heritage as a musical trailblazer. The group�s latest is �Life is a Story� on Mountain Home Music Company. OLD SALT UNION is a string band from Belleville, Illinois founded by a horticulturist, cultivated by classically trained musicians, and fueled by a vocalist/bass player who is also a hip-hop producer with a fondness for the Four Freshmen. It is this collision of styles and musical vocabularies that informs their fresh approach to bluegrass and gives them an electric live performance vibe that seems to pull more from Vaudeville than the front porch. The band�s self-titled debut album on Compass Records is available now. WoodSongs Kid: Cutter Singleton is an 11-year-old banjo wiz from Maryann, Kentucky.

This week on StoryWeb: Jean Ritchie’s book Singing Family of the Cumberlands. If you’re looking for bona fide old-time mountain music – the real deal, before bluegrass, before the Carter Family even – then look no further than Jean Ritchie. Perhaps more than any other performer of her generation, Jean Ritchie gives us the traditional old-time stories and songs and the story of the lived experience of growing up in a family in the Cumberland Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Many Americans know Jean Ritchie from her singing and songwriting career. In addition to songs she wrote (such as “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore”), Ritchie took special delight in preserving, performing, and passing down traditional ballads and other old-time songs. She sings “play party” game songs, she sings murder ballads, and of course, like any mountain balladeer worth her salt, she has her own version of “Barbary Allen.” In her performances, she both told stories and sang songs, accompanying herself on lap dulcimer. I had the great fortune of hosting Jean Ritchie at Shepherd University’s Appalachian Heritage Festival in 1997. That October I got to not only see and hear her perform (complete with “Skin and Bones,” a spooky game song), but I also had the privilege of spending time with her backstage. I found her to be shy, quiet, soft-spoken, completely unassuming. She seemed to know she was “the” Jean Ritchie, but she was remarkably humble about that – both proud of her heritage and her ability to share it and receptive to meeting new folks who appreciated that heritage. If you want to experience Jean Ritchie as a performer, I highly recommend the following CDs: Jean Ritchie: Ballads from Her Appalachian Family Tradition; Jean Ritchie: The Most Dulcimer; Mountain Hearth & Home; Jean Ritchie: Singing the Traditional Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family; British Traditional Ballads in the Southern Mountains, Volumes 1 and 2 (both recorded for Smithsonian Folkways); and her fiftieth anniversary album, Mountain Born, which she recorded with her sons. Collaborations include Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City; A Folk Concert in Town Hall, New York, featuring Ritchie along with Oscar Brand and David Sear; and American Folk Tales and Songs, recorded with Paul Clayton. Recordings of carols and children’s songs are also available. If you want to try your hand at singing mountain ballads and playing dulcimer, check out Ritchie’s instructional album, The Appalachian Dulcimer, as well as The Dulcimer Book. A book/CD combo, Traditional Mountain Dulcimer, also provides instruction. Once you’ve gotten the hang of the dulcimer, you’ll want to buy the collection by famed folklorist Alan Lomax: Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie. The second edition of this volume features eighty-one songs, including “the Child ballads, lyric folksongs, play party or frolic songs, Old Regular Baptist lined hymns, Native American ballads, ‘hant’ songs, and carols” as passed down through the famous American ballad-singing family, the Ritchie family of Perry County, Kentucky. To go deeper in your exploration of Jean Ritchie, consider reading her 1955 book, Singing Family of the Cumberlands, part autobiography, part family songbook. Born in 1922 as the youngest of fourteen children in the Singing Ritchie Family, Jean Ritchie tells the stories behind the songs, the rich family context that gave life and meaning to these songs. Be forewarned: once you pick up Singing Family of the Cumberlands, you won’t be able to put it down. Ritchie’s writing voice is engaging, sweet, light-hearted, even light-spirited in a way. She invites you in to share her world in the Cumberland Mountains. Though she hailed from Kentucky, Jean Ritchie spent most of her adult life living in New York, both in New York City and in Port Washington. She was married to photographer and filmmaker George Pickow, who hailed from Brooklyn. Together, they raised two sons. George, too, was warm and unassuming – and completely devoted to Jean. In the 1950s, she began to record albums and became friends with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Alan Lomax, each of whom had an immense impact on American folk music. By the early 1960s, Greenwich Village was the site of a lively folk music revival. Alan Lomax gathered many of the leading musicians in 1961 and invited them to his apartment on West 3rd Avenue to swap songs. Ritchie’s husband, George Pickow, filmed the impromptu jam session. Of course, you’ll find Jean Ritchie in this rare film, but you’ll also see Roscoe Holcomb, Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Guy Carawan, and the New Lost City Ramblers. And if you look closely in the film’s opening moments, you’ll spy Bob Dylan clogging in the audience. In the 1960s, Jean Ritchie won a Fulbright scholarship to collect traditional songs in the United Kingdom and Ireland and to trace their links to American ballads. In preparation, Ritchie wrote down 300 songs she had learned from her mother. During her Fulbright travels, she spent eighteen months recording and interviewing British and Irish singers. Some of these recordings are collected on Field Trip. In 2015, Jean Ritchie died at age 92 in Berea, Kentucky – and by that time, she had accumulated numerous awards and accolades, including a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, the United States’ highest honor for folk and traditional artists. A wonderful tribute to Jean Ritchie – including many outstanding recordings as well as photographs by George Pickow – is featured on the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center website. Also notable are the New York Times and NPR obituaries. Widely known as “The Mother of Folk,” Ritchie had an immeasurable impact on other musicians who came after her, as evidenced by the 2014 two-CD set titled Dear Jean: Artists Celebrate Jean Ritchie, which features Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Janis Ian, Kathy Mattea, Tim O’Brien, John McCutcheon, Suzy Bogguss, and others. Her songs have also been recorded by the likes of Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and Johnny Cash. Awards, honors, and tributes aside, in the end it all comes back to Jean Ritchie singing a spare, simple ballad like “Barbary Allen.” Take my advice, and check out Jean Ritchie’s recordings and writing. You won’t be disappointed. Visit thestoryweb.com/Ritchie for links to all these resources, to listen to recordings of Jean Ritchie singing “Barbry Allen,” “Shady Grove,” and “Skin and Bones,” and to listen to her talk about writing Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Listen now as Jean Ritchie talks about and sings the song “Nottamun Town.”

Sep. 18, 2014. Performance by Irish step dancer Kevin Doyle. Speaker Biography: Irish step dancer Kevin Doyle of Barrington, R.I., first learned Irish step dancing as a child from his mother, who learned the steps from her mother in Ireland's County Roscommon. From the age of ten, Doyle competed successfully in many East Coast feis (competitions), earning U.S. Irish Dance Champion honors. He teaches and performs with Rhode Island Celtic music performers Pendragon, folk performers Atwater-Donnelly and international Irish dance ensemble Atlantic Steps. Doyle is a recipient of a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He performs with an all-star lineup of Irish musicians, including 2013 Heritage Fellow Séamus Connolly. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6562