Behind the Scenes Audio Logs
Project fieldworkers generated hundreds of audio files, including interviews with community leaders and artists, as well as sound recordings of people’s traditions, such as blues performances in clubs across late 1970s Chicago, a longstanding hub of blues music worldwide. Each fieldworker was tasked with documenting particular cultural communities, as based on their backgrounds and expertise. For instance, the most represented communities in the Collection are Black communities, particularly musicians, singers, and related venues. Folklorists Beverly Robinson and Ralph Metcalfe, along with photographer Jonas Dovydenas, documented Black community life across Chicago at this exciting time. Documents also show how the project team organized the audio files for becoming a collection in the American Folklife Center archives, providing insights into how ethnographic (cultural) collections are formed.
To locate documents for a specific cultural community according to the focus of each fieldworker, use this guide:
- African American Cultures - Beverly Robinson
- African American Cultures - Ralph Metcalfe
- Asian American Cultures - Chungmoo Choi
- German American Cultures - Antony Hellenberg
- Greek American Cultures - Peter Bartis
- Irish American Cultures - Mick Maloney
- Italian American Cultures - Elizabeth Mathias
- Jewish Cultures - Shifra Epstein
- Latinx Cultures - Philip George
- Lithuanian American Cultures - Elena Bradunas
- Native American Cultures - Roberta Fiske-Hajnal
- Polish American Cultures - Susan Kalcik
- Russian American Cultures - Greta Swenson
- Scandinavian American Cultures - Jens Lund
- Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian Cultures - Richard March
- U.S. Southerners in Chicago - Carl Fleischhauer
- Ukrainian American Cultures - Robert Klymasz
