After two weeks of cultural exchange and excitement, the 2014 Folklife Festival on the National Mall ended July 6 but continues online. Although the Festival is over, we continue to feature posts on our Festival blog so that you can explore culture and music featured at the Festival year-round. We are thrilled that so many of you were able to join us to explore the China: Tradition and the Art of Living and Kenya: Mambo Poa programs. We hope you enjoyed some of this year’s highlights:

• Artist Danny Yung and craftspeople from the Wing Kei Flower Shop in Hong Kong built a distinctive, 34-meter-long bamboo Flower Plaque on the National Mall.
• A special “Divas Night” concert celebrated the role of women in Kenyan music and culture.
• Kenyan and U.S. park rangers signed a historic Sister Park partnership agreement.
• The 2014 Festival was our most sustainable to date. We diverted an incredible 93.15% of waste from landfills.

We are always trying to improve the quality of our Festival, including how we represent cultures and what we choose to include in Festival programs.

If you were able to attend the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, we would love your feedback on a short seven question survey.

Help us evaluate how we present cultures at the Festival.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of apartheid, the newest issue of Smithsonian Folkways Magazine spotlights music of South Africa in the Smithsonian Folkways collection.

• Anti-Apartheid Freedom Songs Then and Now
• Interview with Diane Thram of the International Library of African Music
• From the Field: “Proud of who I am”: Venda Children’s Musical Cultures
• Tools for Teaching—South Africa, Free At Last: The Freedom Songs of South Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in America

Smithsonian Folkways Magazine is a free, quarterly multimedia publication. To subscribe, simply join the email newsletter.

Subscriber Discount: Enter code FolklifeThankYou14 at folkways.si.edu and save 20% retail price on your next order through July 31!

What is a songster? The new album in the Smithsonian Folkways Classic Series answers that question through recordings of Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, Lead Belly, Peg Leg Sam, Mississippi John Hurt, John Cephas, and more.

As album co-producer Barry Lee Pearson puts it, a songster “is both a keeper of tradition, disseminating folk materials wherever he goes, and tradition’s worst enemy, contaminating local tradition with modern popular music.”

Read more

The Smithsonian Folkways reissue of two albums per week from the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music continues! Read the latest guest blog posts, and check back weekly to explore musical traditions from around the world.

We have begun digitizing the Lee Hays Collection in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. Hays was a member of the Weavers and the Almanac Singers, and his papers provide an intimate look into the early folk revival. The entire collection, including correspondence, photos, and audio recordings, is being digitized and catalogued for improved accessibility.

Read more about Hays’ correspondence with the Seeger family.

Read more about Hays’ testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Images (top to bottom): 1) Photo by Francisco Guerra, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. 2) South African Double Quartet. Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. 3) Classic African American Songsters album cover photo: “True Lovers of the Muse” by William Henry Jackson, 1902. Photo courtesy of Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress. 4) Smithsonian Folkways UNESCO Collection album covers. 5) Pete Seeger and Lee Hays. Photo by Joe Thompson, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections.