Scope and Content
The collection consists of sound recordings, video recordings, photographs, manuscripts, sheet music, printed ephemera, artifacts, administrative records, and ethnographers' field notes related to the 1978 Blue Ridge Parkway Project field survey, conducted by the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, in cooperation with the National Park Service. The survey examined folklife in and around an area of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Grayson, Carroll, Floyd, and Patrick Counties in Virginia, and Alleghany, Wilkes and Surry Counties in North Carolina. The project documented old-time music, tales, hunting and hunting stories, farming, tobacco cultivation and auctions, vernacular architecture, quilting, foodways (including drying, canning, and baking), religious music and beliefs, as well as dance events featuring square dancing and flatfoot dancing. Recordings and photographs document local music (including concerts, fiddlers' contests, and music in homes), community events, church services and baptisms, local radio programs, and interviews with white and African American residents.
The field notes record the fieldworkers' activities, impressions, and interpretations of the phenomena they observed. As such, they provide a context for the project photographs, sound recordings, and moving images. The collection includes approximately 400 pages of field notes and 100 pages of interview report forms. About 500 pages of logs accompany the photographs, sound recordings, and moving images. These logs identify the subjects of photographs or outline the contents of recordings. They also provide dates, names, and places of documentation. The collection includes two American Folklife Center publications based on these materials and a final report presented to the National Park Service: The Process of Field Research, Final Report on the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project by Carl Fleischhauer and Charles Wolfe (1981).