Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Radio Folgen

Each month, The African American Folklorist honors a Black scholar whose life’s work is immersed in the deep study and preservation of African American folkways, knowledge systems, and community truth-telling. For June, we recognize Dr. Elisha Oliver, a biocultural anthropologist, visual ethnographer, and Executive Director of Texas Folklife, as our African American Folklorist of the Month.Dr. Oliver’s scholarship is rooted in lived experience, land memory, and embodied care. Her work crosses the fields of anthropology, folklore, health equity, and the arts, tracing the relationships between space, place, food environments, and Black wellness traditions. Through rigorous fieldwork and visual storytelling, she brings to light the narratives often overlooked in mainstream academia and institutional folklore.In this episode, we’ll explore how Dr. Oliver uses film, photography, and the spoken word to document the intersections of storytelling, traditional healing, and environmental sustainability. We’ll discuss her contributions to the American Folklore Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her role as a Zora Neale Hurston Award winner and Wenner-Gren Public Scholar Fellow. And we'll go deep, into land as medicine, Black maternal health, and the importance of centering community in every research question asked.https://texasfolklife.org/eoliver@texasfolklife.org

The Blues as Black Sonic Folklore: Part 2:"Hard Ground and High Water: The Blues of Survival and Struggle"We continue our Black Music Month series by diving into the Blues as a witness to environmental crisis and class struggle.Featuring music by Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lead Belly, we explore how songs about flood, drought, and urban segregation serve as time capsules, preserving Black ecological, economic, and emotional history through sound. These are more than Blues, they are survival songs, testimonies of people shaped by both nature and the systems that fail them.

In this episode of Jack Dappa Blues Radio, we welcome Kandia Crazy Horse, Afro-Indigenous musician, rock critic, author, and frontwoman of the genre-defying band Cactus Rose NYC. From the newsroom to the stage, Kandia has blazed a singular trail across rock, country, and Americana—reclaiming sound as a site of cultural sovereignty, survival, and storytelling.We dive into her legacy as editor of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock ’n’ Roll, her academic work at Princeton University, and her bold mission to center Afro-Indigenous identity in American roots music. Her concept of “sonic sovereignty” challenges colonial gatekeeping in music, and her voice—both literal and literary—carries the spirit of revolution.? Listen to Kandia Crazy Horse’s music:? Spotify – “Gravedigger Gonna Cut You Down” Spotify - "Cactus Rose NYC" ? Featured Topics:Afro-Indigenous identity in musicReclaiming Americana and country bluesThe politics of sound and representationCactus Rose NYC and creative freedomRip It Up and the Black Rock archiveCultural revolt in music journalism and academia