Alan Jabbour

Alan Jabbour (June 21, 1942 – January 13, 2017) was an American musician and folklorist, and the founding director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Life and career

Jabbour was born in

magna cum laude from the University of Miami in 1963 and received his M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1968) from Duke University

.

A

folksong, and folklore on tape. This collection, particularly rich in traditional fiddle tunes from the Upper South, is now in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress

.

The documentation trips merged into a process of apprenticeship, and he began playing the fiddle under the influence of new masters, particularly Henry Reed, who was then in his eighties. Out of this interaction arose a band of young musicians, the Hollow Rock String Band, which became the core of the old-time music scene that blossomed in Durham and Chapel Hill in the later 1960s. In 1968, the year that Henry Reed died, the band released a long-playing record, The Hollow Rock String Band: Traditional Dance Tunes.

In 1968 Alan Jabbour became an assistant professor of English and folklore at the

Los Angeles. In 1969 he was appointed head of the Archive of Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture) at the Library of Congress. He edited a long-playing record drawn from earlier recordings in the Archive, which was published in 1971 as American Fiddle Tunes. With Carl Fleischhauer, he undertook a three-year project to research, record, and photograph the history and traditions of a single Appalachian family, from which came the 1973 Library of Congress double record album The Hammons Family: A Study of a West Virginia Family's Traditions. In 1974 he moved to the National Endowment for the Arts

to become founding director of that agency's grant-giving program in folk arts.

In 1976 Alan Jabbour became the founding director of the

fiddle. He has served on numerous panels and boards, including the D.C. Humanities Council (co-chair, 1987–88), the American Folklore Society (president, 1988), the Fund for Folk Culture (chair, 1991–94), the National Coalition for Heritage Areas (1993–97), the European Center for Traditional Culture (1996–98), and the Alliance for American Quilts (1996- ). Chairman of the Board of International Arts & Artists from May 2009 until January 2017.^[2]

To mark his retirement, Alan Jabbour established the Henry Reed Fund for Folk Artists, named for his mentor and dedicated to projects in support of folk artists, especially those represented in the collections of the American Folklife Center. (Folklorist

better source needed

]

References

^ "Alan Jabbour". Archived from the original on 2008-11-20. Retrieved 2008-03-29.
^ "Board of Trustees – International Arts & Artists". www.artsandartists.org. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
^ "Gatherer and Fiddler: Alan Jabbour (1942–2017)". MetaFilter. January 14, 2017. Retrieved January 16, 2017.

4.^"Alan Jabbour: Fiddler, Scholar, and Preserver of Tradition," Steve Goldfield, Fiddler Magazine, Summer 2006. http://www.fiddle.com/_mndata/fiddle/uploaded_files/Sum06-pp14-20%20(Jabbour).pdf

5.^"Alan Jabbour on Henry Reed and the Grand Old Virginia Repertory," Gus Garelick, Fiddler Magazine, Spring 2013, http://www.fiddle.com/_mndata/fiddle/uploaded_files/Spr13-pp4-11%20(Jabbour).pdf

External links

Listening

Family story told by Alan Jabbour

Authority control databases
International	FAST ISNI VIAF
National	Israel United States
Artists	MusicBrainz
Other	IdRef

Life and career

References

External links

Listening

See also