Southern Folklife Collection

JEMF Quarterly. Vol. 17. Winter 1981. No 64

The Southern Folklife Collection is an archival resource at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dedicated to collecting, preserving and disseminating traditional and vernacular music, art, and culture related to the American South. The Southern Folklife Collection is located in UNC's Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.

History

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Folklore Program was one of the first graduate programs for Folklore in the United States. The early faculty included Ralph Steele Boggs, Arthur Palmer Hudson, and Guy B. Johnson, all of whom donated materials that were ultimately placed in the SFC. In 1968, faculty members of the Folklore Program established the UNC Folklore Archives. The John Edwards Memorial Foundation was formed in California in 1962 as an archive and research center named for Australian record collector John Edwards. Following Edwards untimely death in 1960, his remarkable collection of American country music records, along with a wealth of correspondence and other research materials, was strengthened by additions from his American friends and colleagues, including Eugene Earle, Archie Green, D. K. Wilgus, Ken Griffis, Ed Kahn, and Norm Cohen. In 1983, UNC purchased the John Edwards Memorial Collection, and, in the fall of 1986, the UNC Folklore Archives and the JEMC were combined to form the Southern Folklife Collection. The SFC officially opened for research during the Sounds of the South conference at UNC in April 1989.

Australian collector and discographer John Edwards

Scope

The Southern Folklife Collection is an archival resource for the study of American folk music and popular culture. Its holdings document all forms of southern musical and oral traditions across the entire spectrum of individual and community expressive arts, as well as mainstream media production. Centered around the John Edwards Memorial Collection, the SFC is rich in materials documenting the emergence of old-time, country-western, bluegrass, blues, folk, gospel, rock and roll, Cajun and zydeco musics. The SFC contains over 300,000 sound recordings, 3,000 video recordings and 8 million feet of motion picture film as well as tens of thousands of photographs, song folios, posters, manuscripts, books, serials, research files and ephemera.

Collections

Notable collections held by the SFC include those of Broadside magazine, Guy and Candie Carawan, Eugene Earle, William R. Ferris, Folk Alliance International, Alice Gerrard, Archie Green, Peter Guralnick, John Edwards Memorial Foundation, George Hamilton IV, John D. Loudermilk, McCabe's Guitar Shop, Merge Records, Music Maker Relief Foundation, and Mike Seeger.

References

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