African American Legacy Series

In 2007, The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings began a multi-year collaboration to explore African American oral and musical traditions. The African American Legacy Series will include reissues and compilations drawn from the Folkways catalog, plus previously unreleased archival materials and new recordings of contemporary artists. Genres will include blues, jazz, gospel, folk traditions, spoken word, hip hop, and more. The goal is to reach new audiences with historic recordings and capture contemporary traditions for future generations. Purchases of these recordings support the artists that created them and help fund future series.

In 1987, the Smithsonian Institution acquired Folkways Recordings. Since then, the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage has issued new recordings and reissued historic recordings of a wide range of music and spoken word. This archive is a rich resource known by too few people and deserves greater visibility. The National Museum of African American History and Culture initiated an assessment, undertaken by ethnomusicologist Mark Puryear, of more than 7000 tracks of recordings of particular interest to those studying the African American experience.

The range of the recordings includes spoken word and poetry read by the authors Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and Margaret Walker. Ruby Dee and her late husband Ossie Davis bring historical figures such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to life. There are interviews with W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Recordings of music include traditional religious music such as the McIntosh County Shouters, the Moving Star Hall Singers, Flora Molton and field recordings in Georgia and South Carolina. African American pianists include James P. Johnson, Memphis Slim and Art Tatum. There are guitar and banjo pioneers and innovators as well as music of the Civil Rights Movement. Other recording artists include Paul Robeson, Lead Belly, Mary Lou Williams and Bernice Johnson Reagon. There is music for children and music of Africa and its Diaspora.

There are six recordings so far in this series with others in development. In 2007, Paul Robeson, On My Journey: Independent Recordings was released. For the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, “The Roots of Virginia Culture: The Past is Present,” a new recording by the Paschall Brothers, a Hampton Roads A Capella Group was released. On the Right Road Now won the Independent Music Awards’ Best Gospel Album in 2008. Richmond Blues, by the traditional blues masters Cephas and Wiggins was released in 2008. John Cephas passed away in March 2009, however the recording has been nominated for a 2009 Independent Music Award. For the 2009 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Program, “Giving Voice: The Power of Words in African American Culture,” produced with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, A Voice Ringing O’er the Gale! The Oratory of Frederick Douglass, read by Ossie Davis was released in May 2009. In 2010, Rappahannock Blues by the late Virginia piedmont blues artist John Jackson became the fifth volume in the series. In February 2011, Smithsonian Folkways released A Life in Song by GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award winner Ella Jenkins, the “First Lady in Children’s Music.”