Administrative History
The Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project was sponsored by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in cooperation with the National Park Service. It spanned the years 1978 to 1981 and involved three phases: pre-fieldwork, fieldwork, and post-fieldwork. The pre- fieldwork phase occurred between February and August 1978 and involved identifying the section of the Parkway to study, choosing field team members, and preparing a background research document. The fieldwork took place primarily during August and September 1978 and was conducted by ten folklorists and photographers.
This field team included the folklorists Charles K. Wolfe (Middle Tennessee State University), Geraldine Johnson (Strayer College), Patrick B. Mullen (Ohio State University), Blanton Owen (Ferrum College), Margaret Counts Owen (Ferrum College), and Thomas A. Adler (Indiana University), and photographers Terry Eiler and Lynthia Scott Eiler (Ohio University). Carl Fleischhauer and Howard W. Marshall of the American Folklife Center also assisted. The fieldwork included an intern program designed to train selected Park Service employees in folklife study. Although each team member was a specialist in some area of folklife or folklore, all members, except Margaret Owen who focused on dance traditions, acted as generalists and documented a variety of folk traditions. The materials they gathered are diverse and cover a variety of topics. The subjects best represented in the collection are religious services and music, folk narrative, folk architecture, quilting, foodways, tobacco culture, secular music, folk dance, and fox hunting.
The post-fieldwork phase lasted through 1981 and involved preparing the project's final products. A final report, The Process of Field Research, which summarized the project's findings and recommendations, was presented to the National Park Service. Two publications were produced: the book, Blue Ridge Harvest, edited by Terry Eiler, Lyntha Scott Eiler, and Carl Fleischhauer, and the two-LP album set, Children of the Heav'nly King, edited by Charles Wolfe. In addition, several fieldworkers wrote essays on particular topics. The collection was arranged and housed in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, and a large body of duplicate materials was presented to the Parkway for use as a reference archive.