#CAJUN ACCORDION ARCHIVE#TAC: This year, the SFC has been involved in presentations on depression-era grassroots music and left-wing politics (March’s “Depression Folk” lecture and concert) the twenty-five year partnership between farmworkers and students in the Southeast, as chronicled in Student Action with Farmworkers’ archive of photographs and oral histories (August’s “Más de Una Historia”) and the legacy of Eno River conservation efforts (August’s “Saving the River One Song at a Time: The Eno River Festival Legacy”) among other themes. The topics here feel less like dry history and more like the living and breathing issues currently debated in our state politics and across the Southeast at large. Since then I’ve made public programming and publications a more active part of our mission, culminating now in our partnership with YepRoc Records. Ten years later, when I started as the director of the collection, the SFC was co-publishing our second book, a major reference work entitled Country Music Sources which spawned another academic symposium. Steve Weiss: When the Southern Folklife Collection first opened in 1989, it was celebrated with a large event called Sounds of the South which included an academic conference, a concert (held at the ArtsCenter!) and was followed up with a book of the conference proceedings. The SFC is unique not only in its significant size: it also feels more outward-facing, or interactive, than many cultural archives concerned primarily with preservation. Was the SFC originally designed as a platform for festivals, conferences, and publications, or did that function develop as the archive grew over the years? The ArtsCenter: First off, I wanted to get a little background on the Southern Folklife Collection for readers who may be unfamiliar with the special collections archives at UNC. We spoke with Steve Weiss, Curator of the Southern Folklife Collection, about the history of the archive and the details of the Masters of Cajun Accordion Festival. This event celebrates the forthcoming release of Swampland Jewels, a compilation of classic Cajun music produced in a new partnership between the SFC and Hillsborough’s Yep Roc Records. The next event to feature materials from the SFC archives will be the Masters of Cajun Accordion Festival, presented by the SFC and the Friends of the Library at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro on Sunday, October 1st. In this way, archives like the Southern Folklife Collection ensure that we remain informed by our many histories. To meet this demand for accessibility, the SFC regularly presents lectures, concerts, and viewings of its materials, often curated to reflect certain topics of interest in today’s popular culture. #CAJUN ACCORDION HOW TO#One of the challenges facing public archival collections of this size is how to make them accessible not only to researchers, but to the populations they represent. The collection spans an impressive range of media: according to the library, the SFC now contains “over 250,000 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.” The SFC grew out of the Curriculum in Folklore at UNC – which was itself among the country’s first graduate programs in folklore when it was established in 1940 – and features materials documenting the development of all folk musics endemic to the South, including old-time, country-western, hillbilly, bluegrass, blues, folk, gospel, rock and roll, Cajun and zydeco. Residents of Chapel Hill/Carrboro enjoy proximity to one of America’s foremost archival resources for American folk music and popular culture, UNC Library’s Southern Folklife Collection. UNC Library’s Southern Folklife Collection and the Friends of the Library Present the Masters of Cajun Accordion Festival at The ArtsCenter on Sunday, October 1st
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