This collection contains Pat Mullen’s research materials from the 1978 Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project. Conducted with support from the American Folklife Center with cooperation from the National Park Service, the project brought together a team of fieldworkers to document Folklife in North Carolina and Virginia. The final report, Blue Ridge Harvest: A Region’s Folklife (1981), explains the study made, “hundreds of tape recordings- of conversations, story-telling, family histories, descriptions of processes, canning, and sawmilling, musical performances, church services, and fox hunts- and took thousands of photographs- of houses, people, crops, home interiors, baptisms, and dances.”1
In his field notes, Pat Mullen explained that each team member brought their own expertise to the project. His fieldwork focused on folk narrative and belief, and focused on “sacred narratives of white and black people in the region.”
The materials in this collection include:
-
21 cartons of Photo Slides (color, black and white)
-
Materials related to the Project’s Administration (correspondence, research forms,
-
Handwritten fieldnotes
-
Ephemera (newspapers and newsletters, maps, tourism and folk art brochures, etc)
-
Interview forms and audio logs
The collection provides context for Pat Mullen’s research interests in the 1970s, and details about the administration and fieldwork process for the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project.
