Middle Atlantic Folklife Association - mafafolk.org

2009 MAFA Annual Meeting - June 4-7, Chalk Hill, Pennsylvania

2009-03-03T03:49:39Z

The 2009 MAFA Annual Meeting will be held June 4-7, 2009 at the Lodge at Chalk Hill in western Pennsylvania, roughly halfway between Frostburg, MD and Pittsburgh, PA. Please see the attached You'll note that the registration form allows you to indicate whether you're interested in carpooling or sharing rides to/from the Pittsburgh airport. We will, on a limited basis, be able to offer rides for individuals flying into Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT).
The Lodge at Chalk Hill (www.thelodgeatchalkhill.com) is family and pet-friendly, so bring everyone! We've structured the Meeting to allow you and your family plenty of leisure activities. Right at the Lodge, you can enjoy complimentary catch-and-release fishing at Lake Lenore, volleyball, a half-mile lighted jogging trail, and children's area. Free time will be provided so that you can visit local attractions, including Laurel Caverns, Ohiopyle white-water rafting, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob (all within a short drive), or the Flight 93 Memorial (approximately 1 1/2 hours east from the Lodge), and much more! The Great Allegheny Passage (http://www.atatrail.org/) offers great opportunities for hiking and biking.

2009 MAFA Annual Meeting - June 4-7, Chalk Hill, Pennsylvania

2009-03-03T03:44:37Z

2009 MAFA Annual Meeting - June 4-7, Chalk Hill, Pennsylvania

2009-03-03T03:39:24Z

Start:
Thu, 2009-06-04 00:00

The Annual Meeting will be held June 4-7, 2009 at the Lodge at Chalk Hill in western Pennsylvania, roughly halfway between Frostburg, MD and Pittsburgh, PA. You'll note that the registration form allows you to indicate whether you're interested in carpooling or sharing rides to/from the Pittsburgh airport. We will, on a limited basis, be able to offer rides for individuals flying into Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT).
The Lodge at Chalk Hill (www.thelodgeatchalkhill.com) is family and pet-friendly, so bring everyone! We've structured the Meeting to allow you and your family plenty of leisure activities. Right at the Lodge, you can enjoy complimentary catch-and-release fishing at Lake Lenore, volleyball, a half-mile lighted jogging trail, and children's area. Free time will be provided so that you can visit local attractions, including Laurel Caverns, Ohiopyle white-water rafting, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob (all within a short drive), or the Flight 93 Memorial (approximately 1 1/2 hours east from the Lodge), and much more! The Great Allegheny Passage (http://www.atatrail.org/) offers great opportunities for hiking and biking.

MAFA Conference/New York Folk Arts Roundtable April 10-13, 2008

2008-03-12T07:10:27Z

The Middle Atlantic Folklife Association and the New York State Folk Arts Roundtable will come together this year in Cooperstown, New York to present Collections, Collections, Collections, April 10 - 13, 2008. Our colleagues from throughout the region will join with us in a convening devoted to the topic of collections.
The conference will utilize the exceptional resources of the Cooperstown Graduate Program (CGP), New York State Historical Association and Farmers’ Museum. Our special joint meeting marks the largest gathering of folklorists in Cooperstown since the days of the American Folk Culture Program, and we are greatly excited by the opportunity to connect more closely to our Cooperstown colleagues and the students at CGP.
Conference Overview
On Thursday, early arrivals are encouraged to attend Cooperstown’s annual Bruce Buckley lecture, which will be delivered by Amanda Dargan and Steve Zeitlin of City Lore, a New York City based cultural heritage association.
On Friday, the annual meeting will begin with a workshop where you will learn what you need to know when planning the digitization of your audio and visual collections. It will provide essential information about how to prepare to make materials you’ve collected more enduring and widely accessible through digitization. Later that day there will be a presentation on laws and ethics relating to archives, sessions providing an overview of NYSHA’s major collections of New York State folklore and folklife, and a presentation of how archival collections are being made more widely accessible through the web and other methods.
On Saturday morning, we will discuss readings about Louis Jones and Cooperstown’s contributions to folklife studies, followed by a behind-the-scenes tour of the Farmer’s Museum and a discussion of issues relating to outdoor living museums. In the afternoon, you will have a choice of behind the-scenes tours at various locations.
There will be plenty of fun time for socializing and partying including a spring celebration home-style dinner with live music and liquid refreshments in a local church. The meeting will conclude with a wrap-up session on Sunday morning.
Full Conference Schedule with session details and the registration form with pricing and payment information are attached below and can be downloaded.

MAFA Conference/New York Roundtable April 1-13, 2008

2008-03-12T05:56:26Z

Bau Graves, Jefferson Center of Virginia (January, 2007)

2008-01-18T05:53:04Z

Water the Roots: A Proposal
By Bau Graves
Most people in the music industry can trace their passion back to a moment of youthful epiphany when they first heard Muddy Waters, or Hank Williams, or Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie, or Public Enemy, or whoever – and the power and excitement of that instant changed their lives forever. That music emerged from the background noise of America, reached out, and just grabbed hold of us. But the music that we love today would simply never have been created if all those masters of innovation had not had a deep pool of tradition from which to draw.

Bau Graves, Jefferson Center of Virginia (January, 2007)

2007-02-15T07:36:04Z

Engaged Scholarship and Performance: Cultural Research and Practice in the Mid Atlantic Region

2007-03-26T01:58:12Z

2007 Joint Conference of the
Middle Atlantic Folklife Association & Mid-Atlantic Chapter
of the Society for Ethnomusicology
College of William & Mary
Williamsburg, Virginia
March 30 - April 1, 2007
Folklorists and ethnomusicologists from the Middle Atlantic Region will join together March 30 – April 1 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, for the first joint meeting of the Middle Atlantic Folklife Association (MAFA) and the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology MACSEM). “Engaged Scholarship and Performance: Cultural Research and Practice in the Mid Atlantic Region” is the theme for the meeting. We will explore public and applied practice in folklore and ethnomusicology as well as other disciplines and engage with the complex issues surrounding folklorists and ethnomusicologists who perform the traditions they study; what it means for us to act in multiple roles as scholar, presenter and advocate; and problems and opportunities of collaboration with communities presenting their own traditions.

Bob Stone, Florida Folklife Program (December, 2006)

2007-01-07T08:05:15Z

A Good Dog is Worth Three Men
Home on the Swamp with the Florida Cow Dog
Introduction
Cattle ranching began in Florida when Ponce de Leon, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, and other Spaniards introduced Andalusian criolla cattle in the 16th century. Today, Florida ranchers are in the cow calf business. They breed beef cattle, sell the calves when they reach about 400 pounds, and ship them out west, closer to the Corn Belt, where they grow to finished size. For years, Florida was the leading beef cattle producing state east of the Mississippi, and today remains in the top three.
Origins

John Lilly, West Virginia Division of Culture and History (November, 2006)

2007-01-07T08:09:07Z

Thomas Fraser of Shetland
A Transatlantic Wonder
By John Lilly
It would make a swell movie.
Thomas Fraser was born to a poor fishing family on the remote island of Burra in 1927. Burra is one of 100 treeless, windswept isles located 100 miles north of Scotland in the North Sea, comprising Shetland – once a possession of Norway, bequeathed to Scotland as part of a royal dowry in the 17th century. While Shetland is still part of Scotland politically and retains much of its Scandinavian heritage, it is a distinct and independent entity, at least in the minds of those hardy souls who live there.

West Virginia: Gerry Milnes, Augusta Heritage Center (October, 2006)

2006-10-31T07:53:21Z

From the West Virginia Woods
I find myself spending a lot of time in the woods these days.
On weekends, it’s packing into small trout streams to cast for the wily native “brookies.” The mighty Monongahela National Forest, almost one million acres, owned by you and I, is a haven of rest for the weary. It has over 800 miles of hiking trails, contains four wilderness areas—with eleven more proposed, and I’m fortunate enough to own a small piece of land, along Shaver’s Fork, that literally borders it. Hiking from the back door, several miles in an easterly direction takes me into the Otter Creek Wilderness and the headwaters of some highly fishable brooks and streams. In another direction, I’ll end up on Bickles Knob, where an old Civilian Conservation Corp camp provided labor to develop springs and picnic areas, and where there is an observation tower. This along with commonplace stone culverts and abutments to subdue roadside erosion in steep erosion-prone geography leaves the marks of the CCCs on the cultural landscape.

New Jersey: Rita Moonsammy, Independent Folklorist (September, 2006)

2006-10-31T08:05:08Z

THE BLUE DRESS
The author shares an intimate story of family... and how this history led to a career in public sector folklore.
Distribution Restricted. Please contact author directly (RitaZM.aol.com).

Varick Chittenden, Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (August, 2006)

2006-10-20T08:47:22Z

The following is a column I wrote for the New York Folklore Society’s magazine Voices that was published in the Spring-Summer 2001 issue. Even though five years have passed since I developed the piece, I do believe that little has changed in the undergraduate institutions with which I am familiar. Other states may be more fortunate, but New York colleges–which a generation ago had folklore courses offered quite commonly–seem to have eliminated them in favor of who knows what? Of course, I find this sad. What does this mean for the future of folklore studies and for our profession? I offer it as food for thought as a new semester begins.

Virgin Islands: Glenn “Kwabena” Davis, Eudora Kean High School (July, 2006)

2006-10-20T08:43:56Z

STORYTELLING: A FOLK TRADITION FIGHTING BACK
The three genres of folktales in the U.S Virgin Islands are the Bru Nansi, The Jumbi Stories and Legends. They may be placed under the taxonomic classification of gnomic-narrative since most of the stories offer a pithy or aphorism that advises or guides.
In the old days, the storytellers announced themselves and the end of the story was declared with opening and closing response formulas respectively. The introductory announcement was sung or spoken as follows:
Teller: “Children! Children! Children! Children!
Audience - “Daylight gone, Pepe Kwab (the storyteller’s name).”

Virginia: Margaret Yocom, George Mason University (June, 2006)

2006-10-20T08:32:54Z

“Living Words: Folklorists and Creative Writers”
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
— Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (14)
Spring semester’s end brings joy and sadness: joy because classes end and summer roads stretch before me, and sadness because classes end and many treasured students graduate. This semester, those good-byes have been especially hard because one of my best George Mason University classes has just ended—folklore and creative writing—with students like Mary: “Peggy, your class is the BEST class I’ve ever taken for generating new writing. I’ve written several stories, have sketched ideas for a dozen, more, & have solved a major problem in my novel – all directly influenced by the readings for your class. Mary Overton Beall”