Folkstreams - The Best of American Folklore Films
About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- 4–12
- Subjects
- arts (crafts, folk art, music), English language arts (folklore), social studies (African Americans, American Indians, North Carolina, religion, sociology, United States history, women), thinking skills (visual literacy)
- Special requirements
- MPEG, RealPlayer, or QuickTIme are needed to view the films.
Legal
This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.
Folklorists and documentary filmmakers have often worked together on projects. The Folkstreams.net website was created to provide more public exposure for these films which tell the stories of American folk culture. Through the technology of video streaming, Folkstreams.net shows the diversity of American “root culture.”
A contributing unit to this project has been the University of North Carolina Curriculum in Folklore program. Tom Davenport, director of the project, worked with UNC students and faculty members who participated in making five of the documentaries on this site. Seven other films were made by former students from the North Carolina Curriculum in Folklore program after their graduation. With the help of the National Endowment of the Arts and the institutional partners of Ibiblio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and the Southern Folklife Collection in the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this project has become available on the web for all to enjoy.
Educator's guide
The documentary films address numerous topics from agriculture, music, arts and crafts, festivals and customs, to healing and medicine, religion, rural life, and work. All regions of the United States are represented, however the majority of the films feature the South. The site has an Educator's Portal that provides teaching guides, lesson plans, activities, and worksheets to use with the films.
Educators can spark the interest of students in American folk culture by building a curriculum around the films on the website and by providing the background materials to the students as they view the films in the classroom. Background materials for many of the films can be found listed in a menu on the left side of their introductory pages These valuable materials include essays, photographs, sound recordings, and more that would be useful for both teachers and students.
Art and history teachers will find the film “The Angel That Stands By Me: Minnie Evans' Paintings” a wonderful resource to use in their classrooms. Minnie Evans was an African American visionary who painted the visions she saw. For 27 years she was the gatekeeper at Arlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina and she did most of her paintings there. Her ancestors were slaves that came from Trinidad and she talks of them and her art which shows mythical creatures and religious symbolism. Although Minnie passed away at the age of 95 in 1987, students can see her art at the Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington.
When studying North Carolina history, show the film “Madison County Project: Documenting the Sound.” It captures the songs of North Carolina's mountain folk. The unaccompanied ballads have been handed down through the centuries and students can hear them sung by the family members living today. Ballad singer and author Sheila Kay Adams and singers Donna Ray Norton, Denise Norton O'Sullivan, and DeeDee Norton Buckner are interviewed along with John Cohen and Peter Gott, filmmakers who captured the balladeers of the past.
“When My Work Is Over: The Life and Stories of Miss Louise Anderson, 1921-1994” explains what life was like for African Americans in the south before Civil Rights. Miss Anderson, a North Carolina Heritage Award recipient, “tells her family stories and folk tales, and recites poetry in this film taped in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in the last years of her life.” Read more about her on the North Carolina Arts Council website
Other films dealing with North Carolina are:
- “The Ballad of Frankie Silver” - The story of Mrs. Frances Silver who was hanged in Morganton, North Carolina for the ax murder of her husband Charles in 1833.
- “Being a Joines: A Life in the Brushy Mountains” - The story of family and community life, agriculture, religious faith, and the social changes in rural Wilkes County after World War II.
- “A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle” - How one black mother in Granville County used gospel singing to inspire and train her children.
- “Free Show Tonight” - Filmed in Kinley, North Carolina with North Carolina musicians, this film recreates the old time medicine show.
- “Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance: Buck, Flatfoot and Tap” - This film features traditional dancers showing the “styles of solo Southern dancing which are a companion to traditional old-time music and on which modern clog dancing is based.”
- “Born for Hard Luck” - Arthur “Peg Leg Sam” Jackson is shown in this film putting on a medicine show in 1972 at the Chatham County fair in Pittsboro, N.C. The film tells the story of his life as a “black harmonica player, singer, and comedian who made his living ‘busking’ on the street and performing in patent-medicine shows touring southern towns.”
These are but a few of the many films which can be seen on the Folkstreams.net website. Each is a treasure that we are fortunate to be able to see.
