The Library of Congress, like all good library set-ups, wants to preserve as much history as it can and they have a place called the American Folklife Center where they store it all, from film to photos to letters, to personal history set down on paper by regular folk. The AP reports that the Center is currently looking to collect any and all speeches churches, temples and synagogues might have that relate to the upcoming inauguration and it sounds like a really good idea.
Inauguration-week sermons would be videotaped to highlight Barack Obama’s rise to power in an unprecedented quest by the Library of Congress to capture this transfer of power for future generations.
The folks at the library’s American Folklife Center are soliciting churches, synagogues, mosques and others for copies of sermons or passionate speeches that focus on the significance of the Jan. 20 inauguration of Obama as the country’s first black president.
The Folklife Center is looking for both video and audio clips, all to be preserved in a public collection that includes interviews after Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“If a historian asks ‘How did Americans react to Obama’s inauguration?’ we’ll have immediate responses to this powerful event,” said Dr. David A. Taylor, head of research and programs at the American Folklife Center.
The “Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project” marks the first time the library has gathered this sort of material from a U.S. presidential inauguration. Taylor says the project is especially timely — with the inauguration coming a day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — and as it ties into King’s reputation as a great orator.
Nearly 70 percent of the 4,000 collections at the center involve the spoken word, whether it’s on paper, audio or video.
And a chunk of it is also devoted to folk songs, as it happens. The place was originally designed to be the Archive of American Folk Song back in 1928 and has digital recordings of some of the earliest recordings ever made on wax cylinders.
Which reminds me – if you can find it, it’s worth watching Songcatcher. It’s the story of a professor who takes her love of music into the Appalachians after getting turned down for a promotion and discovers the locals still sing their songs in a style long thought lost. She has a hell of a time getting them recorded for posterity, as the movie takes place during phonograph days and it’s not like there are decent roads and trucks to cart equipment around on. There’s also a lame romance going on between this “Songcatcher” and a local, played by Aidan Quinn, who thinks she’s wasting her time. Watch it for the music, not the plot, is what I’m saying.
