Text of the song "Pretty Molly" sung by Pauline Ramsay from Kentucky, from Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941. A recording of the song is available in the online presentation. Part of the cultural documentation found in Kentucky's Local Legacies projects.

Kentucky

The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress through Public Law 94-201 and charged to "preserve and present American folklife." The Center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established at the Library of Congress in 1928, and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world.

Collections

The collections of the American Folklife Center contain rich and varied materials from Kentucky that document the diversity of the Bluegrass State's folk traditions. Among its unique recordings are hundreds of hours of folk music, recorded from the 1930s to the present, including banjo, dulcimer, and fiddle tunes; religious music and sermons; and Southern Harmony singing and Baptist "lining-out" hymns. (Pictured right: Kentucky text of the ballad "Pretty Molly.")

• Kentucky Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture [full text]

Kentucky participated in the Library's Bicentennial Local Legacies project, which includes documentation of local traditions and celebrations for the American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture.

• View Kentucky's Local Legacies projects

Exhibitions

• 1983 "Generation to Generation: Sharing the Intangible," Western Kentucky University, Ivan Wilson Center for Fine Arts, Bowling Green; and University of Kentucky, Council on Aging, Lexington.

Publications

• "The Photographs of Maggie Lee Sayre: A Personal Vision of Houseboat Life," Folklife Annual 90. [catalog record]