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TITLE: Decoration Day in the Mountains
SPEAKER: Alan Jabbour, Karen Singer Jabbour
EVENT DATE: 07/07/2011
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 42 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
Decoration Day is a late spring or summer tradition that involves cleaning community cemeteries, decorating them with flowers, holding religious services in cemeteries, and having dinner on the ground. These commemorations seem to predate the post-Civil-War celebrations that ultimately gave us our national Memorial Day. Little has been written about this tradition, but it is still practiced widely throughout the Upland South, from North Carolina to the Ozarks and beyond.
Speaker Biography: Folklorist and musician Alan Jabbour, founding director of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, has published widely on folk music and folklore. For decades he and his wife, photographer Karen Singer Jabbour, worked together to document grassroots culture in the American South. Since 2004 they have documented Decoration Day from North Carolina west to the Ozarks.
Speaker Biography: Folklorist and musician Alan Jabbour, founding director of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, has published widely on folk music and folklore. For decades he and his wife, photographer Karen Singer Jabbour, worked together to document grassroots culture in the American South. Since 2004 they have documented Decoration Day from North Carolina west to the Ozarks.
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SERIES: Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series