Friday's 13th Francis Lee Utley lecture featured Dr. James Revell Carr, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Carr started the morning with us here at the Center for Folklore Studies, where he toured our archives and advised on best practices for digitizing the Frances Utley music collection.

Next, Dr. Carr was off to the Faculty Club, where he met our Folklore graduate students for lunch. He then visited the sound studio in Hagerty Hall, where he and Rachel Hopkin recorded a podcast episode for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Nouvelle Nouvelle podcast.  

Finally, Dr. Carr presented his lecture, "Digitizing the Archives: Folk Music Collections and the Rise of Digital Humanities." He discussed his participation in initiatives to digitize a wide range of rare and fragile materials relevant to scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines in the arts and humanities, including the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the Cylinder Audio Archive at UC Santa Barbara, the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, and Sounding Spirit, a multi-sited project aimed at digitizing thousands of American sacred songbooks and hymnals.

Dr. Carr ended the day with a rousing sea shanty, "John Tanakanaka," after teaching the audience how to sing along to the chorus.