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Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage

alt="An elder woman with dark skin and short white hair holds up a framed twelve-inch gold record, smiling. Behind her is a seated crowd under a festival tent."

A Century of Ella Jenkins: Tributes to the First Lady of Children’s Music

To celebrate Ella Jenkins on her hundredth birthday in August, we asked a group of musicians how Ella has inspired them.

This illustration shows Lady Liberty over the states that had adopted suffrage, in white.

A Glimpse Into New Mexico’s Suffrage Movement

More than one hundred years ago, women across New Mexico mobilized to fight for the right to vote. Today, we highlight this noteworthy activism in celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month.

Two men wearing traditional feathered headdresses stand in front of two microphones, singing and playing hand drums.

Dennis Zotigh Is a Man of Many Talents, Many Tribes

“As Native people, we have to learn to balance two different worlds.”

A row of people lines up playing flutes. Most are young students, and in the middle is an older man with a long gray braid.

A Lesson About North American Indigenous Flute and Authenticity

North American Indigenous Flute vs. “Native American Flute”: What is lost when the difference between the two traditions is blurred?

Several men and women dressed in all black, standing in formation with a towering stone mountain behind them.

A Catalan Choir Reinterprets Musician Raimon’s Anti-Fascist Lyrics

The Coral Càrmina of Catalonia answers the challenge to arrange a song from the Smithsonian Folkways catalog.

(Photo courtesy of Sandra Chandler)

A Folkways Challenge Reveals a Love for Sacred Harp Singing in Georgia

Douglasville, Georgia, the home of Alexander High School, represents the divide where urban meets rural.

(Photo courtesy of Masatsu “Masa” Kawamoto collection, Division of Work and Industry, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History)

Cowboys in the Tropics: A History of the Hawaiian Paniolo

In 1793, while Hawai‘i was still an independent republic, British Captain George Vancouver gifted King Kamehameha I a small amount of cattle that quickly multiplied. In the early nineteenth century, several Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) were sent to the islands to teach Hawaiians how to ride horses and maintain the cattle. Roping cattle and riding horses seem fitting in the prairie grasslands of Oklahoma, but the Hawaiian style of cowboy traditions is unique to the landscape.

(Photo courtesy of Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles)

The Quarter-Century Reign of Mariachi Reyna

Far from a “girl band” or pop novelty, the group’s success is a hard-earned triumph of gender justice.

Barbara Dane with the Chambers Brothers at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. (Photo by Diana Davies, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives)

How Barbara Dane Carries a Proud Tradition of Singing Truth to Power

Barbara Dane’s protest music took her to Mississippi Freedom Schools, free speech rallies at UC Berkeley, and in the coffeehouses where active-duty men and women steered clear of military police and regulations forbidding protests on bases.

Black Banjo Reclamation Project founders Hannah Mayree and Carlton “Seemore Love” Dorsey, with banjos made by Brooks Masten of Brooks Banjos in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Avé-Ameenah Long)

A Quest to Return the Banjo to Its African Roots

The Black Banjo Reclamation Project aims to put banjos into the hands of everyday people.

Admas. From left, clockwise: Abegasu Shiota, Henock Temesgen, Tewodros Aklilu, and Yousef Tesfaye. (Photo courtesy of Frederiksberg Records)

Sons of Ethiopia: A Snapshot of Admas and D.C. Music in the 1980s

Admas draws from and rearranges “golden era” Ethiopian music with then-fairly-new synthesizer and drum-machine rhythms.

After composing and transcribing music for my wedding day, Red Baraat was born. Dave Sharma leads the baraat (wedding procession) on dhol, as I walk with my mother, family, and friends. August 27, 2005. (Photo courtesy of Sunny Jain)

The Tradition of Now: Jainism, Jazz, and the Punjabi Dhol Drum

While the originations of the dhol are not known with complete certainty, what is known is that it is a sound that has migrated.

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