Dr. Alan Jabbour, retired Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, will be featured in a two-day symposium that is scheduled to coincide with the Department of Theatre and Dance's production of Promises, an original play set against North Carolina history. The symposium is made possible by funding from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Jabbour will:
- Present a lecture, Friday afternoon, October 4, 2013, on the topic of Decoration Days - an important plot element in Promises.
- Participate in a panel discussion following the play performance Friday night.
- Perform on the fiddle in a music and dance presentation on Saturday afternoon at the Jones House.
From Dr. Jabbour's website:
Alan Jabbour was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida. A violinist by early training, he put himself through college at the
University of Miami playing classical music. While a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began documenting oldtime fiddlers in the Upper South. Documentation turned to apprenticeship, and he relearned the fiddle in the style of the Upper South from musicians like Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, and Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. He taught a repertory of oldtime fiddle tunes to his band, the Hollow Rock String Band, which was an important link in the instrumental music revival in the 1960s.
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968, he taught English, folklore, and ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1968-69. He then moved to
Washington, D.C., for over thirty years of service with Federal cultural agencies. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress 1969-74, director of the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts 1974-76, and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress 1976-99. Since his retirement, he has turned enthusiastically to a life of writing, consulting, lecturing, and playing the fiddle.