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Bruce Jackson speaks about The B-Side: Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons. A Record Album Interpretation, a production by the The Wooster Group, New York’s most celebrated experimental theater company. The B-Side is based on the classic LP, Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons, based on Jackson’s 1964 field recordings. Peter Marks of the Washington Post called the production “ravishing,” and “a richly resonant auditory experience,” concluding that “the experience is history in melody, an a cappella song cycle that reveals how men sentenced to hard labor endured, forging bonds through music.” New York Times theater reviewer Ben Brantley named it one of the 10 best plays of the year. Jackson talks about the process of transforming his LP into theater with The Wooster Group, illustrating his presentation with photographs and audio and video clips.
More than four decades have passed since the advent of the new folkloristics. Assessments of this revolution tend to narrowly focus on performance theory and not on whether the broader promises of this era have been realized, especially in areas of cross-disciplinary research. This address will look specifically at how attitudes toward historical scholarship have changed within the discipline of folklore and how we have constructed our own disciplinary histories during this postrevolutionary phase. Finally, the address will look to the future and whether we are reconstructing our past in our current graduate training in the discipline.
