Category: Tom Davenport Papers

New streaming audio!

Southern Folklife Collection John M. Rivers, Jr. Studio. Photo by Dan SearsThe Southern Folklife Collection now has well over 5000 streaming audio files of digitized archival recordings. Recent additions have been made possible through support from a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We’ve shared streaming recordings from the William R. Ferris Collection (20367), Goldband Recording Corporation Collection (20245) and the Mike Seeger Collection (20009) in the past, but we have since more than doubled the amount of streaming content. We’d love to hear your favorites, but as an introduction, we pulled a few that we found particularly fascinating from the most recent additions. Click on the link to go directly to a streaming audio file:

8611: AG 427: Joe Caudill, Bertie Dickens, and Dan Williams, recorded in December 1971 in Ennis, N.C. (continued from AG 424) / Various Others. Side 1Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 12.30.47 PM

  • From the Bob Carlin Collection (20050), The Spencer Brothers, Lance and Maynard. Originally from Virginia, The Spencer Brothers performed on Greensboro’s WBIG and with Stringbean as part of Charlie Monroe’s Kentucky Partners Troupe in the 1940s.

7009: Spencer Brothers at Sister Ruth’s home; recorded by Brad Spencer. 1985.: Side 1Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 12.35.26 PM

  • From the Tom Davenport Collection (20025), we’ve added a number of interviews with Arthur Jackson, aka Peg Leg Sam, and members of the Joines family . Here is one of Jackson conducted during the making of the excellent documentary film, Born for Hard Luck (view it on Folkstreams.net).

324: Peg Leg Sam: interview: Side 1Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 12.36.36 PM

272: John Kelly, fiddle. Dublin. Paddy Glacken, fiddle. Dublin. 2 August 1972. Tony Smith, fiddle. Dublin. 3 August 1972. Side: 1Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 12.37.37 PM

Friday Studio Surprise!: Chatham Co. hogs and Peg Leg Sam

Peg Leg Sam_20025_FT324_Tom Davenport Collection_Southern Folklife Collection_UNC Chapel Hill
Walking past the John M. Rivers Audio Studio this morning, I was surprised to hear a pig being fed coming from behind the door. I was not surprised when I learned that SFC Audio Engineer, John Loy, was preserving an open reel tape of wild sound from Tom Davenport’s documentary with Peg Leg Sam, Born For Hard Luck. We love hearing raw, wild sound, at the Southern Folklife Collection and this clip of Sam feeding his pigs is just that. “Get it you lousy bums,” he growls. From FT-324 in the Tom Davenport Papers (20025). Below you can see an image from the making of the film, including the boom operator, Kip Lornell, who may have made the recording here. I’m ready for lunch:
Pig clip from Peg Leg Sam; Davenport collection_0001
Directed by Tom Davenport and produced by Davenport Films and the Curriculum in Folklore at UNC with Daniel Patterson and Allen Tullos, Born For Hard Luck is a portrait of the last Black medicine-show performer, Arthur “Peg Leg Sam” Jackson, with brilliant harmonica songs, tales of hoboing, buck dances, and an authentic live medicine-show performance filmed at a North Carolina county fair in 1972.
In 2000, Davenport went on to create folkstreams.net, a free website that allows users to stream a massive array of documentary and ethnographic films about American folk culture, ranging in subjects from aging and agriculture to immigrant culture and music and covering all regions of the United States.

Working with folklorist Daniel Patterson and others on the Folkstreams committee, Davenport submitted a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities and received grant funds to build a prototype. Expansion of Folkstreams.net is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, regional and state Arts and Humanities organizations, private foundations, and contributions from filmmakers, scholars, and collaborating institutions. Preservation copies of films on Folkstreams.net are part of the SFC Folkstreams.net Collection (20384). 

P0004_0681_0001 (1) (1)L-R: Peg Leg Sam, Kip Lornell (with boom mic), Bruce Bastin, and Tom Davenport (with camera). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Image Collection (P0004), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives.