Today, the Veterans History Project launches the latest installment of our online exhibit, Serving: Our Voices. The newest exhibit, Forged By the Sea: the U.S. Navy, celebrates the 250^th birthday of the Navy.

The official birthday of the Navy was celebrated on October 13, commemorating the day in 1775 when the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution that created the Continental Navy. While today’s Navy looks very different than it did in 1775, the dedication of American sailors has never wavered since the days of frigates and ironclad warships.

250 years after its creation, the United States is home to nearly four million Navy veterans—over 26,000 of whom have shared their story with the Veterans History Project. In this new exhibit, we sample twenty of these veterans’ narratives, from those who served in World War I through the Iraq and Afghan Wars.

The title of the new exhibit is a nod to the seafaring origins of the Navy and to the ways in which Navy service has shaped and molded sailors’ lives. The allure of the open seas was a frequent enticement for Navy enlistment, and many of the profiled veterans, including Augustus Prince, Lewis Clayton Shaw, Jr. and Heather Sandler, spent lengthy deployments aboard battleships and aircraft carriers. Even if they were not stationed aboard a large ship, water often played a key role in sailors’ experiences. For example, Paul Plumb served as a “frogman,” a combat diver, part of an Underwater Demolition Team that conducted obstacle clearance missions during the Vietnam War.

But for as much time as some spent at sea, many wound up serving far away from the briny deep. Take for example, Marie Brand Voltzke, who worked in Naval Intelligence in Washington, DC during World War II. From Rupa Dainer, an anesthesiologist who served in Afghanistan to Navy pilots such as Thomas Jerome Hudner, Jr., Navy veterans have served in a vast array of conditions and contexts.

They have also weathered some of the most challenging and infamous battles and experiences in US military history. The profiled veterans relate their experiences during Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the “island-hopping” campaigns of the Pacific Theater in World War II. Gerald Ketcher took part in the Battle of Inchon during the Korean War. Two featured veterans, Everett N. Alvarez, Jr. and Gordon Ross Nagakawa, were held as prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. Another Vietnam veteran, Navy Hospital Corpsman Raymond Emilio Torres, was wounded by shrapnel during the Siege of Khe Sanh, but ultimately survived.

Regardless of where, when and how these Navy veterans served, they did so with honor, courage and commitment, exemplifying the Navy’s unofficial motto–Non sibi sed patriae, Not self, but country.

These stories and more are just a fraction of the total narratives relating to Navy veterans within the Veterans History Project archive. After viewing the online exhibit, you can dive into our full collection, and read other Navy-related blog posts. Finally, you can help preserve the story of the Navy veteran in your life by submitting an oral history interview or original manuscript or photograph materials to the Veterans History Project, to be preserved in the permanent archives of the Library of Congress. See loc.gov/vets for more information.

As the Veterans History Project marks its 25th anniversary, we reflect on the extraordinary collection of narratives and artifacts entrusted to us over the years. These stories, told through interviews, letters, photographs and personal mementos, form a powerful record of military service and sacrifice across generations.

To honor this milestone, we are sharing a 25-part blog series that highlights the voices of veterans, the individuals who shaped and sustained the project and the lasting impact these stories continue to have on families, researchers and communities nationwide. We invite you to follow the full series here and join us in celebrating the legacy and future of this important work.

To honor this milestone, we are sharing a 25-part blog series highlighting the voices of veterans, the individuals who shaped and sustained the Project and the deep impact these stories continue to have on families, researchers and communities nationwide.

The following is a guest blog post by Monica Mohindra, Director of the Veterans History Project. Under her leadership, VHP continues to preserve and share the stories of U.S. veterans while expanding access and engagement, honoring its 25-year legacy and reaching new generations of audiences.

We invite you to follow the full series here and join us in celebrating the legacy and future of this important work.

Reflecting on 25 years of the Veterans History Project, I’m reminded this anniversary is not just a milestone for the Project, but a celebration of every voice and individual’s effort that has helped forge this living archive rooting us to our foundational spirit of service and resilience. Twenty-five years ago, through unanimous consent, the United States Congress passed a bill that established the Veterans History Project. Then-Representative Ron Kind (WI-3) said on the House floor that the bill “directs the Library of Congress to establish a national archive for the collection and preservation of the oral history, through videotaped testimony, of our veterans.”

Explaining the value to young people, he continued, “in the 22nd or even 23rd, 24th century we’ll be able to access through the internet the videotape statements of their great-great-great grandfather or grandmother who served during the 2nd World War, Korea or the Vietnam war, The Gulf War. What an incredibly powerful history lesson that would be. And future historians being able to research this part of history by using first-hand accounts.”

He went on to address why he felt that the Library of Congress is uniquely suited to archive the Project through illustrating the American Folklife Center’s existing demonstration of expertise and technological capability in a collections effort that videotaped community leaders across the country speaking to “how they would like their communities to be remembered in 100 or 200 years from now”

In support of the bill, he and other members, you can hear directly from the House debate here, built on the April 2000 resolution naming the “American GI the Person of the 20th Century,” declaring there could be no better way to honor such veterans then by preserving their first-person accounts. They invited families, loved ones, members of veteran service organizations, students, libraries and historical societies to join together for the benefit of the nation to participate in a worthwhile project- “one that will require the cooperation of countless people across the country, but especially from our veterans who can leave an incredible gift; a gift that will keep on giving generation after generation.”

Years later, we see that it is an enduring promise linking the service and sacrifice of U.S. military veterans to their families and communities, and all of us to our collective and shared history. Now, more than 120,000 veterans’ stories fulfill that call to share, as experts of their experience, the collections of these first-person narratives Today that corpus offers unique perspectives from Alaska to Puerto Rico and Maine to Guam, and everywhere between.

Like many people across the country, until the recent death of a loved one, I was unaware of my own direct connection to historic events and individuals that shape our shared national identity. In the wake of that loss, it became clear that my family had preserved the documentation of the personal experiences of one of my great-great grandfathers who served in the Civil War. Discovering that, anchors my understanding of my family’s role and responsibilities to our country. While the Veterans History Project legislation begins our common cause here at World War I, I have personally realized the generational gift described at its founding and am filled with a renewed sense of gratitude for the thousands of individual veterans, families, volunteers and partners whose efforts ensure the benefits of the Project for us all.

In the season of gratitude, from Veterans Day through Thanksgiving and the holidays, we invite you to join us to help kick off the Project’s silver anniversary year with 25 blog posts from multiple viewpoints, including former directors and staff. We will explore the origins, lessons, and growth of this participatory national endeavor, and unearth new pathways to understanding from the multitude of veteran voices. As we all step together toward another momentous anniversary, 250 years of e pluribus unum, there is no better time to stop and listen to those who raised their right hand and embodied that compact, shoulder to shoulder: * above all, aiming high, always faithful, and always ready, not for self but for country, in service to the health of, and to defend, – whether in a fox hole, over ledgers, with a scalpel or a drone – this grateful nation.

From all of us at the Veterans History Project, thank you for being part of this important work of preserving the stories that remind us who we are and the sacrifices that have shaped our nation.

*The mottos listed above represent the branches of the U.S. military: Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, Coast Guard and Space Force, as well as the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Each reflects the values and commitments of service members that inspired the description “above all, aiming high, always faithful, always ready and not for self but for country, in service to the health of the nation and to defend” in the text.

There has been an enormous amount of research on the spiritual beliefs, doctrines, ceremonies, and celebrations of religious congregations throughout the United States. Far less information has been compiled about the day-to-day duties and responsibilities it takes to run a religious community. The lack of information on religious workers as workers — rather than their roles as spiritual counselors and guides — is why the American Folklife Center (AFC) is so excited to add folklorist Taylor Dooley Burden’s recently completed collection “Occupational Lives of Religious Workers in Kentuckiana” to our archive.

Supported with funding from the AFC’s Archie Green Fellowship and recently posted to our website, this new Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection features interviews with priests, pastors, ministers, and a rabbi about how they support and maintain their congregations.

I recently spoke with Taylor about her innovative project. Here are some excerpts of our conversation:

NG: What an interesting project! What led you to your research?

TDB: I’m glad the AFC team felt it was a successful oral history project because I know that it was it was very meaningful to me. I’ve worked in churches and I’m currently on staff part-time at a church. As a folklorist, I think we bring our “folklore eyes” to every circumstance. All of that played into my thinking, “Okay, what does it look like to be a pastor or a religious leader?” I wanted to look at their lives from an occupational perspective — religious work as an occupation.

A lot of these people would call it their vocation, but it’s oftentimes a small part of their income. Maybe they’re bi-vocational and they work two places, but if you were to ask them what their job is, they would refer to their religious work.

NG: Tell me a bit about your own training.

TDB: I got my undergraduate degree in history at Western Kentucky University and then my master’s degree in folk studies, also at Western. I’m originally from Owensboro, Kentucky, and I live technically in Indiana now, but just 10 minutes from Owensboro. So that’s why a lot of the fieldwork was done in the area, because I’m from here and I know a lot of the people here.

I come from a long line of religious leaders — my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather [were part of the Southern Baptist Convention]. I’m the first woman. I don’t think I’m the black sheep of the family, but I could be!

NG: How did you begin your interviews?

TDB: “What does a day look like?” You know, that was kind of like a simple basic question, but with these religious workers, it’s not just preaching or teaching or praying. It’s visiting someone in a hospital. For example, during COVID, I interviewed Pastor Kamlen Haokip, who is originally from Burma and now leads a congregation at the Bellevue Baptist Church. He would pick up prescriptions and drop them off at people’s doors. Others, like Rabbi Gary Mazo of Temple Adath B’Nai Israel in Evansville, Indiana, spoke of meeting with people at the hospital or tending to people on their deathbed as being a large part of his job.

There’s rarely ever a job description, and even if there is, what a day looks like often goes far outside expectations. Many of these [religious workers] are on call 24-7, and they’re making, in some cases, I don’t know, a couple hundred dollars a week, if that.

NG: So how did you identify the 16 people you interviewed?

TDB: Religion and occupational work have long been of interest to me, and so I keep tabs on what congregations of people in my area are doing. So, when I was applying for AFC’s Archie Green Fellowship, I already had an idea of who I’d be interviewing. A lot of them are people that I’ve worked with in different interfaith spaces or in different city-wide faith events… or people that I either knew personally or had a connection with through a friend.  Like Rabbi Mazo — I’m not Jewish, but I have friends who are Jewish and so they were able to connect me with him. He’s very active in interfaith organizations, but I hadn’t met him personally.

NG: I imagine that a lot of these people are routinely asked for their religious opinions and for religious guidance, but you were asking something different. Were they pleased or amused to be asked what they needed to do in the background to foreground their faith?

TDB: One thing I told everybody before I interviewed them that the interview was based on occupation rather than belief, [but] a lot of those things do go hand-in-hand, and for a lot of them it’s hard to separate the two. How they see their role defined is intrinsically tied to their beliefs and based on the scripture that they follow. So, I think some of those things couldn’t be and wouldn’t be – wouldn’t make sense to be separated. Maybe that’s reflective of the nature of their positions and that they so often are shepherding other people.

NG: Was there anything that surprised you?

TDB: The rabbi that I interviewed. I don’t want to use the word challenging, because it wasn’t challenging, but as I was interviewing him it made me aware of how some of the questions that I had gone into the interview with weren’t necessarily applicable across all faith traditions. You know, some of those easier baseline questions… I kept using the word “church” and he would say, “Oh, well, you know, we don’t call it church.” I thought the rabbi’s formal training was really interesting, too. It was one of my favorite interviews.

NG: What are you working on now? Are you going to do more research on religious workers?

TDB: Currently I’m entrenched in the beautiful world of arts administration — I recently became the Director of Traditional Arts at South Arts in Atlanta, but I think religious work as occupation, as labor, is important and relevant. A lot of these narratives have not been represented in previous collections, especially because so often when people are talking about people in religious spaces, it is about belief. So, I was excited to be able to share it from an occupational perspective.

As a religious worker, even if you’re not getting paid or getting paid well, it is still very much your job and a lot of these people work twelve hours a day for pennies on the dollar. They deserve to be part of the national record.

Download the episode here

Informed by an advisory board made up of community activists and line dance practitioners, Queen and her team explored the history of the R&B or Soul Line, defined in the project application as “a body of African American expressive creative culture that includes dance, music, language, dress, social gatherings and celebrations.” Early on, Queen realized she had to determine the scale of the project and limit the interviews to the community located in and around the Philadelphia tri-state area. Even with limiting the scope, Community on the Line includes interviews with over 300 dancers, choreographers, DJs, and participants from the Soul Line Dance community.

“Our line dance community? They move together all the time. I had to scale it to Philadelphia, Delaware, and New Jersey, but it’s beyond that. When I say our line dance community moves, it moves beyond that. It moves into the DC-Baltimore area. It moves across the country, right? And so it was family gathering and family sharing together at that moment and at that time. And that’s a big part of who this community is. People say, that’s my line dance family, that’s my family. So it’s always a family when it comes to soul line dancers.”

People who turned out for the February 27, 2025 public program definitely felt the line dance family love. Over 1200 attendees traveled to the Library that day, where they filled all the corners of the Jefferson Building’s Great Hall with music, laughter, and dancing. For those present, it was impossible not to be caught up in the excitement. “That was my joy,” Queen shared. “That our community took ownership of it. And I kept hearing that. ‘Look what we did.’ It wasn’t any one individual. It was this community who came together.”

AJ Rivers is a member of the same Tri-State line dance community as Queen. In addition to contributing an interview, AJ and fellow DJ Chris Blues were part of a highly successful culminating public event held in 2023, where project participants got a chance to see early versions of the oral histories and, of course, dance to their favorite songs. Two years later, AJ was also involved in the LATL program held at the Library. When asked how he got involved, AJ shared:

“Well, I got involved in the project once I got a phone call from Queen telling me what she wanted to do. I’m like, okay. So, she broke it all down on how we was going to do this. I’m like, okay. And she wanted to get interviews from everybody. And she chased me around for about weeks. Weeks! “When you coming? When you coming?” So finally I got over there and I met with her, Aileen, and Gloria, and we did the interview. And it went great. But then as we got closer to the actual event, I got more involved with trying to make sure everything was OK. Because we didn’t know what to expect. And man, when we got there, it was off the chain. Amazing. It was like it was like the weight of the world lifted off everybody’s shoulder all at the same time.”

In addition to bringing four buses of line dance practitioners to the Library, Queen’s team also brought soul line dancing to the nation through an early morning appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America. It was an opportunity that came about while Queen was preparing press releases in the lead-up to the February LATL event. The turn-around was tight, but Queen and her team pulled together a small group and arranged for separate transportation that would stop in NYC first, and then travel to the DC area in time for the evening’s event. “The funny thing is,” Queen said, “the producer – when I spoke to her, she said ‘I’ve been wanting to do a line dance segment for over a year.’ And she said, ‘Now I know why I couldn’t do it. It had to be this day.’ […] It was history. You know, it was meant to be.”

During the collection period for Community on the Line, AJ Rivers and Chris Blues sat down to discuss the history of line dancing in the Tri-State area and provide more insight as to how DJs impact the success of an event – balancing older songs and dances loved by long-time dancers with the new songs favored by younger participants just getting started in the community. Unfortunately, before the interview could be transferred and included with the rest of the oral histories, the computer drive it was saved on fell and the data was lost. It was a moment that made for an important but heart-breaking lesson in documentation.

Even though the collection period for this particular project is over, Queen still intends to go back and re-interview both AJ and Chris, as their perspective is too important to ignore. “I’ll get them in the studio again and do that interview,” she promised, “because they were the voice of the DJs, right? And the DJs are so important. They’re critical to, this, this, to this culture, right? They, they’re critical to this living tradition. So that, that was the most challenging thing of anything. It broke my heart, you know. So what I would recommend is a couple of drives. Save it in a couple of places. That, that’s one thing. Download it immediately into at least two places, right? And then you might have one online.”

As we asked if they had any last thoughts to share before the interview drew to a close, AJ spoke up. “I’ve got a question,” he said. “Can we do it again? It was so much fun. It’s like, why can’t we just make it an annual event?”

“We were all feeling the pride in it,” Queen agreed, “and all of them understanding that our story is important and is valuable.” Both the documentation project and its culminating event, as well as the February 2025 event here at the Library showed what the line dance tradition means to people “in terms of healing, unity, family, love.”

For the complete interview with Queen Nur and AJ Rivers, visit the Folklife Today podcast page or click here for the full episode.

[Note: The intro/outro music for this episode comes from another CCG project – Sonidos de Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene. The clip features an instrumental medley performed by Avizo during an open-air concert documented in the course of the CCG project.]

Other Resources

Check out these posts about the Community on the Line CCG project, from the Library’s blogs.

From Folklife Today: 

• Community Collection Grants: R&B Urban Line Dancing on “Of the People” – by Stephen Winick (November 28, 2022)

• AFC’s Community Collections Grants: Community on the Line Culminating Celebration – by Michelle Stefano (April 10, 2023)

From Of the People, Widening the Path:

• Community Collection Grants Recipients: Community on the Line: The Culture of R&B Urban Line Dancing in the Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware Tri-State Area – by Stephen Winick (November 18, 2022)
• Community Collections Grants: Community on the Line Culminating Celebration – by Michelle Stefano (March 29, 2023)

For more photos and news releases about the Soul Line Dancing event held during February 27th’s Live! at the Library, visit the project page on In Fact, Inc’s website

The 2024 Artists in Resonance Fellowship provided Cindy and Mark the opportunity to immerse themselves in the field recordings of folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell, who in December 1936 and January 1937 visited communities in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks. On August 21, 2025, the duo returned to the Library at the invitation of the AFC to perform some of the materials they learned here. In anticipation of the event, Mark was excited to return. “We get to take these songs Sidney Robertson recorded on a repeat journey of sorts, from the nation’s capital to the Ozarks and back again,” he said.

In this concert The Creek Rocks bring these old songs back to the Library in shiny new arrangements. Hear it in the player below!

In the interview, we learn more about The Creek Rocks, their dedication to traditional music, and their use of archival sources. We discuss their work as songwriters and as musicians in several bands. Of course, we talk about their current album-length recording project based on the Sidney Robertson Cowell recordings, which will be the culmination of their fellowship tenure. Their debut recording, “Wolf Hunter,” was a similar project, featuring sixteen songs gathered from two well-known folk song collections, those of Max Hunter of Springfield, Missouri (Mark’s birthplace), and John Quincy Wolf of Batesville, Arkansas (where Cindy grew up).

According to Mark, the Sidney Robertson Cowell recordings are probably the earliest audio documents of folk music in the area, yet are virtually unknown locally. Part of the duo’s mission is to make these archival treasures better known in the Ozarks.

The field recordings they explored also preserve what is possibly an earlier stratum of folk tradition, as Cindy pointed out:

“When you go back to those recordings, there’s some melodies that are—just, they sound so different from everything you hear today. They sound kind of ancient.”

According to the duo these ancient-sounding melodies tend to be modal, rather than based on the major or minor keys of Western art music, and they are more common in the Cowell collection than in the later field recordings made by Wolf and Hunter. In the interview they talk about their discovery of some of these modal songs in the collection. View the interview in the player below!

You can find both of these videos with more bibliographic information on the Library of Congress website. You can also find them on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.

Collection Connections and Links

Band and Ozarks Music Links

• First of all, visit The Creek Rocks online!
• Visit “Ozarks Alive,” a cultural preservation project that seeks to document the region’s people and places.
• Read our previous blogs about The Creek Rocks.
• Visit the Max Hunter collection at Missouri State University.
• Visit the Ozark Folksong collection at the University of Arkansas.
• Visit the John Quincy Wolf Collection at Lyon College.
• Visit the Alan Lomax Southern U.S. 1959-1960 recordings, featuring Ozark music and song.
• Visit the DC Bluegrass Union, who helped us promote this concert.

Ozarks Resource Guides

We don’t have a research guide specifically devoted to the Ozarks region, but you can find the relevant materials in two state collections:

• American Folklife Center Collections: Missouri
• American Folklife Center Collections: Arkansas

Concerts, Other Videos, and Blogs

• Here are most of the old-time music concerts and programs on the Library of Congress website.
• A series of Blog Posts about Ozark singer Lillian Short and some of her songs, with audio.
• A blog post about Ozark collections, including audio examples of the Sidney Robertson Cowell Recordings.
• Here are the blog posts at Folklife Today about Old Time Music, including Homegrown concerts!
• All the blog posts at Folklife Today that mention the Ozarks.
• Find out more about the Artists in Resonance Fellowships.

Thank You!

As always, thanks for watching and listening (and reading)!

The Artists in Resonance Fellowships at the American Folklife Center are intended to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the Center’s Archives.

For information on the Artists in Resonance Fellowships, visit this link.

The American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Concert Series brings music, dance, and spoken arts from across the country, and some from further afield, to the Library of Congress.

For Homegrown Plus blogs, visit this link at Folklife Today.

For information on current concerts, visit the Folklife Concerts page at Concerts from the Library of Congress.

For past concerts, visit the Homegrown Concerts Online Archive. 

The Aubrey and Reacher novels, of course, have taken their respective Jacks from the page to the screen, and this suggests we might start with dramatic adaptations of Jack Tales, on both stage and screen. Let’s begin with Jack in the theatre!

Jack in Drama and Comedy

We know there have been Jack Tale comedies and dramas since at least 1819, when we have the first record of “Jack and the Beanstalk” pantomime. Pantomime, often colloquially known as “panto,” is a genre of musical comedy developed in Britain in the 18th century, based on Italian Commedia Dell’arte and other classic comic genres. Panto shows typically run during the holiday season, although they don’t often have overtly holiday themes. In the 19th century pantomime was heavily influenced by current trends in music halls, so pantos often feature piano-based renditions of typically English popular songs, with the audience encouraged to sing along. Similarly, during the broad, slapstick comedy segments, the audience is expected to shout phrases to the actors, such as the warning “he’s behind you!” Gender-crossing is common, with men playing women’s roles and vice versa. Pantomimes frequently use common folktales or fables for their plot, and Jack is a perennial favorite, as the posters above show. In fact my hometown troupe, the British Players of Washington, DC, did “Jack and the Beanstalk” as their annual show just this past Christmas.

Interestingly, “Jack and the Beanstalk” as a tale emerged just as panto was developing out of Commedia.  It may be telling in this regard that the very first known version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” from 1734, “Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean,” was published in the book “Round About Our Coal Fire: or, Christmas Entertainments.” It is not in the form of a play script, but its description as an “entertainment” suggests it might have been acted out or at the very least read aloud, and its association with the Christmas season is intriguing.

In the U.S. there’s another popular dramatic adaptation of “Jack and the Beanstalk”: a play by the well-known children’s playwright Charlotte Chorpenning. It was first produced by the Federal Theatre Project in 1934, and the Library of Congress has posters, photos, and design drawings from that production. One of Chorpenning’s innovations was the character who bore the magic beans, Frehol, who was a figure like a human beanstalk. He was played in the 1934 production by Vito Scotti, a character actor trained in Commedia Dell’arte who went on to a long career in movies and TV, including a supporting role in “The Godfather.” See Vito Scotti in costume as Frehol, and the design drawing for the costume, at the top of the post!

Dramatic Jack tale adaptations go past the typical beanstalk and giant-killer tales, too. In North America, playwrights and drama teachers have considered dramatized Jack tales a good way to teach performance skills with a side helping of local and regional heritage. Ferrum college had a performing group called the Jack Tale Players who performed dramatized versions of the tales from 1975 until 2012. They still get together for reunion performances, including one for their 50th anniversary this October. Similarly, in Newfoundland, the artistic collective Sheila’s Brush began performing plays based on Jack tales in 1980, and one of its members, Andy Jones, has continued to adapt and perform dramatized tales to this day, including “Jack Meets the Cat,” “Jack and The Three Giants,” and “Little Jack The Little Fisherman.” Jones also adapts Jack tales as children’s books, and is part of a collective of artists exploring The Jack Cycle, which describes its goal as “forging a Newfoundland folk epic.”

Playwrights in other countries and languages have drawn on their own versions of Jack too. Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” is widely understood to have drawn heavily on tales of Espen Askeladden, the Norwegian Jack; Derek Wolcott’s “Ti-Jean and his Brothers” uses Caribbean Jack tales with French Creole background; and numerous German playwrights have crafted versions of Hans tales, including “Hansel and Gretel.”

Jack has been adapted for the screen many times. Edwin Porter and Arthur White directed what was perhaps the first Jack tale movie in 1902: “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The silent classic was billed as “A grand spectacular performance in nine scenes and one tableau, illustrating the most popular fairy story ever written….” You can watch that film, as restored by the Library of Congress, in the player below.

Since the 1902 film, Jack and the Beanstalk has been adapted for film and TV well over a hundred times, starring everyone from Gene Kelly to Vanessa Redgrave, and from Abbot and Costello to the Teletubbies. The part of Jack has been played by Mickey Mouse, Tweety Bird, Woody Woodpecker, and (of course) Bugs Bunny. Notably, in 1983, it was episode 6 of the popular TV show “Faerie Tale Theatre,” starring Dennis Christopher as Jack, Elliott Gould as the Giant, and Jean Stapleton as the Giantess. “Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story,” a 2001 TV miniseries, begins with Jack’s modern descendant, and works its way backward to explain Jack’s original tale, with effects by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The 2020s have brought us new versions for TV, including a pantomime-style version by Peter Duncan and a children’s comedy starring David Walliams.

“Jack the Giant-Killer” has also been a popular theme for films, including an early version by Walt Disney (1922). This tale has been treated a little more seriously, being made into straight action films as often as comedies. The best known is probably the 1962 stop-motion epic directed by Nathan Juran, which adds structure to Jack’s giant-killing exploits by creating a framing story about a princess captured and bewitched by the evil lord Pendragon. On the other hand, who could forget 2013, when we had to choose between “Jack the Giant Killer,” directed by Mark Atkins and starring Jamie Atkins and Ben Cross, and “Jack the Giant Slayer,” directed by Bryan Singer and starring Nicholas Hoult and Ewan McGregor? Canadian animator Bryant Fryer’s now-lost 1932 version is also notable, as it is reportedly one of the first Canadian films with a dedicated music score.

Of course, films have been made drawing on other Jack tales, including Stuart Kinder’s “Jack and the Fairies” (1912) Tom and Mimi Davenport’s “Jack and the Dentist’s Daughter” (1984) and “Soldier Jack or the Man who Caught Death in a Sack” (1988), and Brandon McCormick’s moving modern Jack tale “Jack and the Dustbowl” (2012). Finally, movies that draw on the Jack tale tradition more generally include “How Ivanushka the Fool Traveled in Search of Wonder” (1977), “Legend” (1985), and “Puss in Boots” (2011).

We also might mention a special series of short films made by the National Film Board of Canada about Ti-Jean, the French Canadian version of Jack. The three educational films placed Ti-Jean in a modern  context, in order to teach Canadian children about life in the lumber camps of Québec in the early 20th century, the wheat fields of the Canadian West in the 1950s, and the Iron mines of Labrador at about the same time. As he visits each region and works in each industry, the young Ti-Jean engages in superhuman feats such as outrunning a speeding train, chopping down and processing thousands of trees, and saving a mine from deadly sabotage. Although the plots aren’t literally folktales, the first film ends with the words: “This film was inspired by the superhuman exploits of Ti-Jean, hero of many French Canadian folk-tales.” The films were acted more or less as silent movies with almost no audible dialogue, but with a narrator telling the story in voiceover. This had the practical effect of making it relatively easy to create a French-language and an English-language version of each film without much awkward dubbing. But it also had the artistic effect of making each film literally a story told by one voice with a visual interpretation on the screen, which worked well with Ti-Jean’s folktale origins. The films are available to watch on the National Film Board of Canada site:

• Ti-Jean s’en va-t-aux chantiers (1953)
• Ti-Jean Goes Lumbering (1953)
• Ti-Jean s’en va dans l’Ouest (1957)
• Ti-Jean Goes West (1957)
• Ti-Jean au pays du fer (1958)
• Ti-Jean in the Land of Iron (1958)

Jack in Musical Arts

In music, Jack has been the subject of a few operas and operettas, largely for children. One example that’s popular today sets a new libretto by John Davies telling the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to music written by Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. A more curious example from the 19th century was an operetta on “Jack the Giant Killer” by Deakin’s Liliputian Comic Opera Company. The company, founded in Milwaukee in the 1870s, featured little people in most of the roles, and specialized in stories featuring characters of disparate sizes, including “Jack the Giant Killer” and “Gulliver’s Travels.” A more musically ambitious opera on a Jack Tale theme is Otakar Ostrčil’s “Honzovo Království,” generally known in English as “Jack’s Kingdom.” (Czech “Honzovo,” like German “Hans,” is a diminutive of “John,” equivalent to English “Jack.”) “Jack’s Kingdom” adapts Tolstoy’s “The Tale of Ivan the Fool,” which as we have seen was itself based on a Jack tale in which Jack, seemingly the simplest of three brothers, is the only one able to defeat the Devil.

“Jack and the Beanstalk” is also a major component of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods.” Perusing the Library’s recent acquisition of Sondheim’s papers might turn up interesting details about the character as envisioned in his music and lyrics!

Jack in Visual Arts and Comics

In visual arts, likewise, Jack has thrived. This very series of blogs at “Folklife Today” has been full of illustrations of Jack. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, anonymous woodcuts illustrated chapbook renderings of “Jack and his Step-Dame,” “Jack the Giant Killer,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Classic illustrators of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Walter Crane, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Arthur Rackham, illustrated the Jack stories, especially those featuring giants. More recent illustrators, from Victor Ambrus to John Howe, have all had a crack at Jack.

Jack was an important character in one of the most acclaimed fantasy comics of the early 21st century, Bill Willingham’s multiple-Eisner-award-winning comic book series, “Fables” (2002-2015). The series began with an unnamed young man urging a New York cab driver to go faster. Readers were soon introduced to the near-frantic passenger: Jack, a former fairy-tale hero who had been expelled from his homeland by the mysterious “Adversary,” and who was living in exile in New York City. Jack was joined in his predicament by such fairy-tale regulars as Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, the Frog Prince, the Three Little Pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf. Through multiple storylines, Jack remained one of the series’ most compelling characters, and eventually spun off into his own comic series, “Jack of Fables” (2006-2011), in which he was revealed to be Jack Horner, who is not only the the sword-wielding hero of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Jack the Giant-Killer,” and the other Jack tales, but also the nursery-rhyme star of “Little Jack Horner” and “Jack Be Nimble.”

Unusually for an adaptation of Jack tales, Jack in “Jack of Fables” is a completely self-centered, unlikable character with almost no redeeming qualities. Playing with the fact that Jack varies from story to story, the comic introduces different versions of Jack, from his doppelganger Wicked John to his son, Jack Frost. The series also adds unusual characters, including anthropomorphic personifactions of such literary ideas as censorship, revision, the deus ex machina, and the pathetic fallacy. This allows Willingham to comment on the meaning and function of stories, while also following the amusing exploits of Jack and his friends and adversaries. For folktale enthusiasts, the series also takes detours into some traditional tales, including a fascinating version of “Soldier Jack.”

The revived “Fables” comic (2022-2024) preserved the continuity of “Jack of Fables” by not featuring Jack Horner, who was otherwise occupied during the time period it depicts. However, it introduced two new Jack characters in the form of “Jack(s) in the Green.” Jack in the Green is the title given to the protector of the Black Forest, and the books occur just as an older male Jack retires and is succeeded by a young woman Jack. The idea of Jack as not an individual but a role which involves protecting a community, and which can be filled by either men or women, is similar to the idea of Jack in Charles De Lint’s “Jack of Kinrowan” books, which we disussed in our last post. This suggests that new traditions about Jack are emerging and developing in the context of modern fantasy literature and comics.

One of the most unusual works of what w emight call “Jack art” is the Jack Tales Wall, a 30 by 50 foot bas-relief sculpture wall depicting scenes from Jack tales, located at Southwest Virginia Community College. The Jack Tales Wall was sculpted in brick by Johnny Hagerman. It was designed by Charles Vess, an artist and illustrator and winner of the Hugo, Eisner, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards among others. (The Library of Congress has Vess’s original artwork from his graphic series “The Book of Ballads.”) Vess recalls that, when challenged to think of a good theme for wall art at the college, he was initially stumped, but soon had a powerful idea:

“Jack of the mountains, Jack and his brothers, Soldier Jack, — The Jack Tale. Who better to represent the people of these four counties than young Jack, the hero of hundreds of lively tales, indigenous to the Appalachian mountains? These very tales that were brought by the Scots-Irish and German immigrants from Europe into the southwestern Virginia region during the mid 1700’s. Much as the early pioneers adapted themselves to this mountain environment, so did their stories adapt along with them. Thus, tales that were first transmitted orally throughout the British Isles and written down by the Brothers Grimm in Germany, mutated here into stories with an intrinsically ‘American’ hero. A hero who possessed limitless optimism and a trust in his absolute ability to control his own destiny.”

Back to Jack

The many ways in which Jack has been borrowed and reflected in modern culture give us as audiences multiple ways to experience this favorite character. Still, while you can and should enjoy Jack tales as novels and short stories, as movies and TV shows, as pantomimes and plays, as operas and musicals, or as drawings and sculptures, I believe one of the best ways to experience Jack tales is still to listen to traditional storytellers. More than that, this is the only way to understand what these tales are like in their best and most effective forms. Obviously, the best way to do this is to find good local storytellers who know Jack Tales. If you can’t find one, of course, you can listen to recordings of storytellers, ot watch videos. In the player below, you can hear Maud Long tell one of her best Jack tales, “Jack and the Bull.”

I’ll end with a link to a video from AFC’s Alan Lomax collection, in which you can watch Ray Hicks tell a humorous tall tale about Jack’s hunting exploits. If you really listen, you might find that Ray can transport you into the story more completely than a book or TV show can.

In the video, you’ll see several members of Ray’s family enjoying the story, including his nephew Frank Proffitt, Jr. Frank once said of Ray Hicks: “he becomes Jack when he’s telling. And when I watch him, we both become Jack.”

We can all become Jack by watching the video at this link!

The Henhouse Prowlers have been touring and performing for two decades. Now they proudly look to the future, expressing their passion for music and humanity. Banjoist Ben Wright and upright bassist Jon Goldfine have been the heart of the band since its inception, while guitarist Chris Dollar and mandolinist Jake Howard (who joined 7 and 5 years ago respectively) bring fresh energy to the band’s sound.

The Prowlers approach music with a reverence for tradition coupled with willingness to explore beyond the ordinary. In their concert, they apply their trademark four-part harmonies to original songs in the mode of classic country and bluegrass as well as modern Americana. They also play a Kazakh folksong, a Nigerian hip-hop song, and a gospel number that manages to be funny, irreverent, and spiritually sound. Hear the concert in the player below!

In the interview, we learn about the lives of the musicians and how they came to play bluegrass in Chicago. They talk about how young people got involved in acoustic and bluegrass music when they started out, and how their own paths led them to join this band. We discuss particular influences they had in their musical journeys.

The band members also speak quite a bit about their nonprofit, Bluegrass Ambassadors. They explain the genesis of the idea in their tours for the U.S. State Department, and tell some moving stories about their work bringing music around the world.

View the interview in the player below!

You can find both of these videos with more bibliographic information on the Library of Congress website. You can also find them on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.

Collection Connections and Links

Band and Bluegrass Links

• First of all, visit The Henhouse Prowlers online!
• Visit their nonprofit organization, Bluegrass Ambassadors, to learn about their mission of dissolving boundaries of culture, country and communication on a global scale by teaching the universal language of music.
• Visit the DC Bluegrass Union, who helped us promote this concert.

Bluegrass Resource Guide

Bluegrass Music: Resources in the American Folklife Center is your first stop for bluegrass collections and event videos at AFC. American collections at AFC.

Concerts, Other Videos, and Blogs

• Here are most of the bluegrass-related concerts and programs on the Library of Congress website.
• Here are the blog posts at Folklife Today that mention Bluegrass

Thank You!

As always, thanks for watching and listening (and reading)!

The American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Concert Series brings music, dance, and spoken arts from across the country, and some from further afield, to the Library of Congress.

For Homegrown Plus blogs, visit this link at Folklife Today.

For information on current concerts, visit the Folklife Concerts page at Concerts from the Library of Congress.

For past concerts, visit the Homegrown Concerts Online Archive. 

The American Folklife Center is excited to announce the launch of its new easy-to-use Botkin Lecture Resource Guide, which gives users direct access to hundreds of hours of world-class lectures on folklore, folk music and traditional culture by prominent scholars, artists, authors and performers.
Since 2003, the American Folklife Center (AFC) has sponsored the Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture Series. The series is named in honor of Botkin (1901-75), a prominent folklorist who headed the American Folklife Center’s archive in the 1940s, and curated by AFC staff. The Botkin Lecture Series annually features 8-10 prominent scholars, researchers, authors, and experts from across the United States and around the world speaking on a wide variety of folklife related topics.

Over the years, hundreds of prominent folklorists, ethnomusicologists, traditional artists, and scholars have accepted AFC’s invitation to present Botkin Lectures. More than 130 of their presentations have been videotaped for the AFC collections. However, they can be difficult to find, especially by topic or area of interest. The new Botkin Lecture Guide, which is organized and cross-referenced by more than a dozen topics including Music & Dance, Verbal Arts, Food & Agriculture, Visual Arts & Adornment, and Fieldwork & Documentation, makes finding, accessing and enjoying these talks easy. Featuring such important figures in the world of folklore as Stetson Kennedy, Billy Bragg, Nora Guthrie, Anthony Seeger, Don Yoder and Martha Cooper, the Guide is an excellent introduction to the world of contemporary folklore scholarship.

Botkin Lectures are usually 45-55 minutes in length and recorded at the Library before an audience of 50-70 people. Speakers are asked to prepare engaging public presentations designed for non-specialist audiences. Botkin Lectures are therefore suitable for high school, college, and adult education courses. Many Botkin lectures are closed captioned to meet ADA specifications. (In some cases, we also record an interview with the lecturer and post both together here at Folklife Today in the blog series “Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus,” which is also accessible from the Guide.

Botkin lectures may be accessed online or downloaded without charge for personal use or for educational programming. (Crediting the American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress is always appreciated, however!)

We hope you’ll enjoy exploring the full range of lectures available through the new Botkin Lectures Resource Guide — once again, at this link!

The Veterans History Project and the U.S. Navy Memorial are teaming up to present the 2025 Sea Service Film Festival, inviting students nationwide to participate in preserving the stories of America’s veterans.

For several years, the U.S. Navy Memorial has hosted students from around the country through its their Sea Service internship. As part of the program, interns conduct oral histories of Navy veterans and produce short films based on those interviews. The full interviews are then donated to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project (VHP).

For the first time, the Veterans History Project (VHP) and the U.S. Navy Memorial are inviting students in grades 5–12 to create and submit short documentaries featuring the stories of U.S. veterans for the 2025 Sea Service Film Festival. Students in grade 10 and above may also submit their projects to the Library of Congress for inclusion in the Veterans History Project archive. This unique opportunity encourages teachers, parents and mentors to engage young people in documenting and preserving the powerful, personal histories of those who have served our nation.

The festival includes two submission categories:

• Documentaries of 10 minutes or less
• Shorts (1 minute or less)

All films must feature at least one veteran from either the Veterans History Project (www.loc.gov/vets) or U.S. Navy Memorial’s (https://navylog.navymemorial.org/search-navy-log) collections.

Participants are highly encouraged to conduct their own oral history interview of a veteran for use in their film, and these interviews will count towards the requirement as long as the qualifying footage is submitted to the Veterans History Project to create a VHP collection for that veteran. Instructions, rules, and guidelines for creating and submitting an oral history to the Veterans History Project can be found at https://www.loc.gov/programs/veterans-history-project/how-to-participate/.

The top 20 films will be screened at the Library of Congress at a public screening on November 13, 2025 where the top filmmakers will be honored on-stage and receive a certificate recognizing their achievement.

Full rules and entry instructions are available at https://www.navymemorial.org/national-sea-service-film-festival and prospective entrants can email ahub@loc.gov with any questions or education@navymemorial.org for an official entry application.

Whether you’re a student filmmaker, educator or parent, the Sea Service Film Festival offers a powerful way to connect with the stories of our nation’s veterans and ensure their legacies are preserved for future generations. We encourage all eligible students to take part in this meaningful project. One film can make history.

The first episode in this new series is titled “Exploring 1950s Gullah Geechee Sonic Life with Dr. Eric Crawford.” It focuses on the Penn Community Services collection (AFC 1957/009), which includes recordings of music, preaching, and testimonies from the Gullah Geechee people of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, made in 1955 and 1956.

Listen to “Exploring 1950s Gullah Geechee Sonic Life with Dr. Eric Crawford” on Folklife Today

The collection was created by Courtney Siceloff, a Quaker and White Civil Rights activist, who served as director of Penn Community Services—a community center on St. Helena Island for the island’s Black population—from 1950 to 1969.[1] Siceloff recorded church services, community gatherings, and other musical events across St. Helena Island for this collection.

I invited Dr. Eric Crawford to be a guest on the episode. Dr. Crawford is the author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (University of South Carolina Press, 2021). At the time we recorded this podcast, Dr. Crawford was the Interim Chair of the Music Department at Claflin University. Dr. Crawford is also an accomplished musician, who regularly performs with Gullah Geechee community members. His deep knowledge and lived experiences make him an ideal guide for understanding these recordings.

The Penn Community Services collection is important for several reasons. First, the collection documents a house blessing—a community celebration marking the completion of a new home. These ceremonies, led by local religious leaders, usually included an opening scripture, prayer, song, remarks, a closing prayer, and a benediction. As Crawford notes in Gullah Spirituals, house blessings often featured songs that included housing-related themes, such as “I’m Working on a Building,” “I’m Gonna Build,” or “Come and Go With Me to My Father’s House” (Crawford 2021: 56-60). In the podcast (11:29 – 18:48), we hear community members singing “This Old House Gonna Fall” at a 1955 house blessing.

Second, the collection dispels the idea that Gullah Geechees are a monolithic community, by demonstrating a variety of Gullah Geechee musical practices in the mid-1950s. For example, the collection includes recordings from Community Sings—a monthly gathering at Penn Community Services where Gullah community members sang spirituals and other songs. Until 1948, Penn Community Services functioned as a school, called Penn School. Founded in 1862, as part of the Port Royal Experiment, Penn School was one of the first educational institutions for Blacks in the South. Most singers at Community Sings were graduates of Penn School and were thought to be more “formally” educated than others on St. Helena Island.[2] Participants in the Community Sing employed a style of musical practice that Courtney Siceloff identified, in a 1956 letter, as more “refined.” In the recordings, for example, the Community Sing participants do not employ hand clapping and they sing with well-defined parts. Furthermore, the Community Sings, according to Siceloff, were a space where Whites were not only welcomed, but for whom much of the program was intended in the mid-1950s. As Siceloff wrote in a 1956 letter, “although these Sings are in some way for the Negroes own interest, it is well recognized that much of their effort is directed to white people who are frequent visitors. An offering is taken that is divided between the public high school and a community activities council or community council.” Gullah people singing for White visitors would certainly have impacted the performance style during Community Sings.

In contrast, recordings from Nazareth Baptist Church and First African Church—two houses of worship that served more rural Island residents—reveal a more animated musical and worship style. White people were largely absent from these churches, allowing Black Islanders to make music in ways that they found valuable. Siceloff, in a 1956 letter, described these musical performances: “The singing obviously is of a different character than that of the Community Sing, the pronunciation is not so distinct, nor is there the polished effect resulting as in the community sing of performing for others. However, in my opinion, both are valuable, though the church singing is the more interesting.” In the podcast (7:04 to 9:19 and from 18:49 to 22:54), Dr. Crawford discusses this diversity of musical expression, using examples from Nazareth Baptist Church and Penn Community Services’ Community Sings.

Finally, this collection is important because it documents Gullah Geechee communities during the Civil Rights Movement. Penn Community Services was as one of the only places in the South where Whites and Blacks could meet and organize during the Civil Rights Movement (Burton 2014: 74-76). Dr. Martin Luther King visited Penn Center five times, and many believe that King wrote part of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech there.

While the recordings in this collection do not address the Civil Rights Movement directly, several testimonies document Gullah people’s efforts to battle disenfranchisement—a core tenet of the Civil Rights Movement. For example, Deacon James “Garfield” Smalls offers an extended testimony about the importance of Gullah land:

I want to say, to the mother[s] and the father[s], have a desire. A desire for what? A desire for your child to do something great. Have a desire that your child may be able to hold the inheritance in which their father and mother leave for them. That’s this valuable land . . . that we’re traveling across daily. You can see across the island, everywhere you go, you can see some two buildings [being] put up. Mother[s] and father[s] . . . if you all don’t instruct these children to hold onto these inheritances . . . you know in past years, a number of years ago, people on this island been getting land for one dollar an acre. Now today, an acre of land costs a hundred dollars or more. Mother[s] and father[s], I say have a desire, teach your children to realize the blessing that God has given, to them, to the inheritance of their great-grandparents. Because as you can see widely, the island is drifting away, no matter about these homes, these homes don’t mean anything. Don’t mean nothing, if you all don’t realize how to take care of this land that the parents left. To be sure, the most of us ain’t gonna be able to buy none of them. Why? It’s too high. We [are] not thinking that much, we [are] not making that much preparation . . . wake up young men and young women. The time that you had already, you ain’t gon see that time anymore.

At the time of the recording, Smalls was in his mid-30s. He later became one of St. Helena Island’s most respected elders and singers. In 2018, he received the Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award for his contributions to South Carolina’s traditional arts. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 100. In the podcast (22:55 – 27:38), Dr. Crawford reflects on Smalls’ legacy and the central role of land in Gullah Geechee culture.

The Penn Community Services collection is just one of more than twenty-two collections related to the history and culture of Gullah Geechee people at the American Folklife Center, spanning from 1926 to 2024. You can explore these collections at the American Folklife Center’s Research Guide on Gullah Geechee Collections or by visiting the American Folklife Center Reading Room.

Works Cited:

Burton, Orville Vernon. 2014. Penn Center: A History Preserved. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

Cooper, Melissa L. 2016. Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Crawford, Eric Sean. 2013. “The Penn School’s Educational Curriculum: Its Effects on the St. Helena Songs.” Journal of African American Studies 17(3): 347–369.

Crawford, Eric Sean. 2021. Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda. 2014. Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Siceloff, Courtney. Papers. Penn Community Services Collection (AFC 1957/009). American Folklife Center. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.

Footnotes:

[1] Penn Community Services has had several name changes since its inception. From 1862 to 1901, the institution was called Penn School. In 1901, it became Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School reflected a change in its pedagogy. In 1948, the institution changed its name to Penn Community Services, Inc. as it transitioned its work from a school to a community center. In 1950, according to the organization’s website, the institution became Penn Center. While this collection was made in 1955 and 1956, much of the collection at the American Folklife Center still identifies the organization as Penn Community Services. Indeed, even the stationery used in 1955 and 1956 lists the organization as Penn Community Services. With more certainty, I can share that, today, the institution continues its work serving Black residents of St. Helena Island under the name “Penn Center.”

[2] The dichotomy between “formal” and “informal” education can be a fraught, and debatable, distinction. I use these terms here as they are the words used by Courtney Siceloff, in this letters about the collection and from his observations of local Black culture on St. Helena Island in the 1950s. These letters can be accessed in the Penn Community Services collection materials in the American Folklife Center Reading Room. For a more detailed analysis about Penn School’s educational mission and the musical activities of Penn School, see Crawford 2013.