Folklife Preservation Through Songs and Stories With the Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive
The Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive was established by Derek Piotr in August 2022. The Archive contains over one thousand audio recordings collected from March 2020 onward, from the United States, Canada, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Scotland, Serbia and Ukraine, in many languages and dialects. The Archive preserves diverse representations of folklife: ballads, hymns, tales, poems, children's songs, and interviews among them. The focus of this collection is on the "non-singer"; someone with no background in musical performance who can nevertheless relate a song or folkloric memory. The vast majority of the recordings in the Archive showcase unaccompanied vocal performances.
In browsing the Archive, you will hear singing from all walks of life: from nuns to bartenders, children to centenarians, folk-song scholars, siblings making barnyard noises in unison, residents of a nursing home collectively recalling patriotic standards, farmers singing murder ballads, and legends of the folk scene sharing their earliest remembrances of learning through home-singing. You will hear memories of hospice journeys, faith healing practices, tornado survival, and supernatural hauntings.
Derek Piotr is a folklorist, researcher and performer whose work focuses primarily on the human voice. His work covers practices including fieldwork, vocal performance, preservation and autoethnography; and is primarily concerned with tenderness, fragility, beauty, and brutality. He has collaborated with artists including Scott Solter, Nathan Salsburg and Thomas Brinkmann across various disciplines. Derek is the lead archivist and creative director of the Fieldwork Archive.