(AGENPARL) – lun 08 agosto 2022 You are subscribed to Folklife News & Events from the Library of Congress.
Join us for the American Folklife Center’s latest Botkin lecture, starting August 10 at noon. “Songs and Tunes from the French Creole Corridor” by Camille Moreddu.
Note: The videos won’t appear until about noon on August 10, at which point they’ll be at the link! If you visit the link before that, you can check out our blog…and subscribe!
On August 10, we’ll premiere a new video lecture in the Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series–in both English and French! The lecture is by Camille Moreddu, a French cultural historian who recently finished her Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress. The Lovelace fellowship is specifically for the study of the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax collections, and Moreddu focused on what she called the “French Creole Corridor,” primarily in the Upper Midwest. These French-speaking communities are less well known than the ones in Louisiana and New England, but they retained fascinating French culture for Lomax and other collectors to record in the 20th and 21st centuries. In her lecture. Moreddu reviews the repertoire found in these and related collections–from Great Lakes voyageurs’ songs and French-Canadian fiddle tunes to the ballads, winter ritual songs, and local songs of the Creole settlements of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. She also discusses methods and experiences of the different collectors; the histories of colonial era Francophone settlers as well as later immigrants from France, Belgium, and Canada; and how the French cultural presence was integrated into the narrative and historiography of the American frontier.
Moreddu’s video lecture, in both English-language and French-language versions, will be embedded in a blog post at Folklife Today. At noon on August 10, you’ll find it at the link below. If you visit the link before that, you can explore the blog, and then subscribe so you’ll receive notification of the lecture when it becomes available.