Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard 'Pioneering Women of Bluegrass: The Definitive Edition' out on October 21, 2022 on CD and digital, and available for pre-order now.

The soaring harmonies and driving string-band sound of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard shattered the glass ceiling of male-dominated bluegrass in the 1960s. Hazel and Alice’s influence on music – and not just roots music – is hard to overstate. They’ve been acknowledged by artists as diverse as country superstars Naomi and Wynonna Judd, champion flat-picker Molly Tuttle, and proto-feminist punk rocker Kathleen Hanna. Their steadfast devotion to their own hard-hitting style inspired generations of women in bluegrass.

The Definitive Pioneering Women of Bluegrass

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard - Childish Love

Bear Head Lake

Charlie Parr - "Bear Head Lake"

Little Sun

Portland Avenue

Charlie Parr - "Portland Avenue"

Boombox

Charlie Parr - "Boombox"

Ann Savoy - Cajun Love Song

Ann Savoy - Waterloo Sunset

Las Olas

Mariachi Los Camperos - "Las olas — The Waves"

El Toro Viejo

Mariachi Los Camperos - "El toro viejo — The Old Bull"

Georgia Sea Island Singers led by Mississippi Fred McDowell - "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning"

Songs of the Spanish Civil War rekindles the hymnal of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, more than 2,600 American volunteers who fought General Francisco Franco and his fellow fascists from Italy and Nazi Germany to defend the popularly elected Spanish Republic during the 1936-1939 conflict. These songs, recorded around the time of the war’s end and later reissued in the 1960s by Folkways Records, still inspire supporters of democratic causes around the world. Singers include Pete Seeger, Tom Glazer, Butch and Bess Hawes, Woody Guthrie, Ernst Busch, and Bart van der Schelling. 

04 Viva La Quince Brigada (Long Live

Alash 'Achai', now available: https://folkways.si.edu/alash/achai

Achai, the Tuvan word for father, describes a deep paternal participation in the upbringing and growth of a new generation. It is also a fitting title for Alash’s new album to honor Kongar-ool Ondar, who served not only as a musical father for the ensemble, but also for an entire generation of Tuvan musicians. As Ondar shared memory and tradition, so too does Alash with spirited performances and forward-thinking collaborations. In the group’s first studio album for Smithsonian Folkways, Achai beautifully illustrates the adaptability of Tuvan music—organically created and deeply rooted, yet still interconnected with the sound world of the 21st century. Featuring master beatboxer Shodekeh, alongside time-honored Tuvan throat-singing styles, the album demonstrates how members of Alash have dedicated their lives to performing, preserving, developing, and growing the Tuvan tradition. They are worthy bearers of the culture of their fathers and sons. 57 minutes, 24-page booklet.

Achai

Alash - Oglumga (For My Son)

Alash - My Throat, the Cuckoo

Los Texmaniacs 'Cruzando Borders' now available: https://folkways.si.edu/los-texmaniacs/cruzando-borders

Tejano conjunto Los Texmaniacs was born to cross borders of all kinds—between past and present, traditional and creative, Spanish and English, country and Tejano, Texas and Mexico. Cruzando Borders embraces all of these, with ballads of the border, instrumental pearls of the past, and signature songs popularized by the Texas Tornados when Texmaniacs leader Max Baca toured with them. Guest performances by Lyle Lovett on Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” and country singer Rick Treviño on his own “I Am a Mexican” round out this tribute to the tragedies, triumphs, hopes, and humor of Mexican American life along the border.

Cruzando Borders

Los Texmaniacs - Mexico Americano (Mexican American)

An audio journey through Folkways and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1948-2018, compiled by our Curator and Senior Archivist Jeff Place, it features 70 important releases in the history of the company.

https://folkways.si.edu/70stories

61 Abayudaya congregation, led by J.J. Keki - Psalm 136

AVAILABLE 2/22/2019: https://folkways.si.edu/songs-of-our-native-daughters

Songs of Our Native Daughters shines new light on African-American women’s stories of struggle, resistance, and hope. Pulling from and inspired by 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century sources, including slave narratives and early minstrelsy, kindred banjo players Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell reinterpret and create new works from old ones. With unflinching, razor-sharp honesty, they confront sanitized views about America’s history of slavery, racism, and misogyny from a powerful, black female perspective. These songs call on the persistent spirits of the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers who have fought for justice – in large, public ways – only now being recognized, and in countless domestic ways that will most likely never be acknowledged. 52 minutes, 36-page booklet with lyrics. Note: LP versions omit the track "Better Git Yer Learnin."

“An artistic mission to supplant the portrayals of slavery as an abstract, ancient sin with the imaginative, immersive contemplation of its individual human impact and aftermath" - NPR

“A crucial pronouncement in folk music” – Rolling Stone

Our Native Daughters - Quasheba, Quasheba

Our Native Daughters - Black Myself

'The Social Power of Music' AVAILABLE 2/22/2019: folkways.si.edu/the-social-power-of-music

MUSIC HAS THE POWER TO BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

From parties to protests to prayer, music is a powerful catalyst for celebration, for change, and for a sense of community. Through making music together, we become bigger than ourselves. Whether singing with our families and friends or with thousands of strangers in an arena, music transforms lives, engages individuals, and connects local and global communities. The Social Power of Music chronicles the vivid, impassioned, and myriad ways in which music binds, incites, memorializes, and moves groups of people. This richly illustrated 124-page book, with 80+ tracks on 4 CDs, invites listeners into musical practices, episodes, and movements throughout the U.S. and beyond. These songs of struggle, devotion, celebration, and migration remind us that music has the potential to change our world.

The Social Power of Music

The Almanac Singers - Which Side Are You On?

Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land

Lester Bradley and Friends - Golden Slippers / The Butterfly Whirl

Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn 'Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn' available 4/3/2020 on CD, and Digital, 5/29/2020 for LP.

Stream/download: orcd.co/wufeiabigailwashburn

Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn’s debut collaborative release is a testament to the connective power of music across seemingly disparate cultures. Merging American old-time music and Chinese folksong, Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn features gorgeous, impressionistic renditions of traditional material from the hills of Appalachia to the prairies of Xinjian province, each tune flowing seamlessly into the next. The effervescent resonances of Wu’s guzheng zither dance around Washburn’s expressive banjo playing, their voices intertwining English and various Chinese dialects. This album recasts “world music” as music of our shared world, highlighting our shared humanity and the transformative power of song.

Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn

Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn - The Roving Cowboy / Avarguli (阿瓦尔古丽)

AVAILABLE 4/17/2020 on CD & Dig

José-Luis Orozco is an internationally acclaimed performer and composer of Spanish and English bilingual children’s music. On ¡Muévete!: Songs for a Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body, Orozco’s humor and skills as a dynamic educator connect us to his world of joy, discovery, and exuberant musical expression. Encouraging young children to move their bodies in joyous ways, ¡Muévete! perfectly complements his Smithsonian Folkways Grammy-nominated album ¡Come Bien! Eat Right!. The eighteen animated, original songs and dances on ¡Muévete! are in Spanish and English, encouraging kids to express themselves through movement and to learn new words as a result. Take a listen, move your body, and have some fun!

¡Muévete!

José-Luis Orozco - El baile de los colores

Kronos Quartet 'Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger' available October 9, 2020 on CD, 2xLP, and digital. Pre-order starting 7/29/2020.

On 'Long Time Passing,' the trailblazing Kronos Quartet celebrates the music of Pete Seeger and rejoices in the spirit, inspiration, and fearlessness inherent in his life’s work. Along with guests Sam Amidon, Maria Arnal, Brian Carpenter, Meklit, Lee Knight, and Aoife O’Donovan, the group examines Seeger’s celebration of beauty and the pleasure of singing together. Through the power of these eternally relevant cries for unity and moral integrity, the album articulates the responsibility we have as citizens and members of a greater community to question war and injustice, and to develop the courage to raise our voices together both in word and song.

Kronos Quartet - Where Have All The Flowers Gone? - S. Amidon, B. Carpenter, L. Knight, A. O'Donovan

Leyla McCalla's 'Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes' available October 16th, 2020 on CD, LP, and digital. 

Leyla McCalla’s Vari-Colored Songs is a celebration of the complexity of Black culture and identity, and a tribute to the legacy of poet and thinker Langston Hughes. A songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, McCalla sets Hughes’ poems to her own spare yet profound compositions. She juxtaposes these with arrangements of folk songs from Haiti, the first independent Black nation and the homeland of her parents, tapping into the nuances of Black experience. McCalla’s music elegantly weaves Haitian influences together with American folk music, just as Hughes incorporated Black vernacular into his remarkable poetry, and the way the Haitian Kreyòl is a beacon for the survival of African identity through the brutal legacy of colonialism. This is music of reclamation, imbued with a quiet power that grapples with the immense weight of history.

Leyla McCalla - Mèsi Bondye

Charlie Parr 'Last of the Better Days Ahead', out July 30th, 2021 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on CD and digital and November TBD 2021 on 2xLP.

Charlie Parr’s newest album, Last of the Better Days Ahead, is a collection of powerful new songs about how one looks back on a life lived, as well as forward on what’s still to come. Its spare production foregrounds Parr’s poetic lyricism, his expressive, gritty voice ringing clear over deft acoustic guitar playing that references folk and blues motifs in Parr’s own exploratory, idiosyncratic style. When it comes to what it all means, Parr says it best: 

“Last of the Better Days Ahead is a way for me to refer to the times I’m living in. I’m getting on in years, experiencing a shift in perspective that was once described by my mom as ‘a time when we turn from gazing into the future to gazing back at the past, as if we’re adrift in the current, slowly turning around.’ Some songs came from meditations on the fact that the portion of our brain devoted to memory is also the portion responsible for imagination, and what that entails for the collected experiences that we refer to as our lives. Other songs are cultivated primarily from the imagination, but also contain memories of what may be a real landscape, or at least one inspired by vivid dreaming. The album represents one full rotation of the boat in which we are adrift—looking ahead for a last look at the better days to come, then being turned around to see the leading edge of the past as it fades into the foggy dreamscape of our real and imagined histories.” – Charlie Parr

Charlie Parr - 817 Oakland Avenue

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States. We are part of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located in Washington, D.C. 

We are dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound. We believe that musical and cultural diversity contributes to the vitality and quality of life throughout the world. Through the dissemination of audio recordings and educational materials we seek to strengthen people's engagement with their own cultural heritage and to enhance their awareness and appreciation of the cultural heritage of others.

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