The Archive of Alabama Folk Culture (AAFC) was established in 2006 to preserve fieldwork, research documents, recordings, and artifacts of the state's folk traditions. It is located in the newly-expanded Archives building on Washington Avenue, across from the State Capitol in Montgomery. The AAFC is a collabrative project of the Alabama Folklife Association, the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. It is funded with proceeds from the sale of "Support the Arts" car tags and with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A  key component of the AAFC is a studio equipped to copy 78rpm records, long-play albums, reel and cassette recordings, and various other audio and video recordings to digital format. There folklife archivist Kevin Nutt is working to make decades of research done by state folkloristis and scholars accessible to the public.

The Archive of Alabama Folk Culture Audio Visual Lab 

Programs for the City Stages Festival and the Alabama Folklife Festival 

The initial project for the AAFC is the digitizing and archiving of the recorded performances from the Alabama Folklife Festival (1989-1993) and from the Alabama Folk Sampler Stage at Birmingham’s City Stages music festival (1991-2002). High quality recordings were made of each performance and the collection was donated to the AAFC in 2007. Bluegrass, gospel, sacred harp and blues are some of the genres represented. Hundreds of performances were recorded and as soon as they are digitized and archived many of these recordings will be made available for listening on the Alabama Department of Archives and History website. Stay tuned.

 Recovering transcription discs

In February 2010 the AAFC received a set of Presto lacquer discs recorded in 1951 from the Center for the Study of the Black Belt in Livingston, Alabama to be cleaned and digitized. Presto recording machines were the recording devices that people used before the advent of home tape recorders beginning in the mid-1950s. The significance of this collection is that the recordings were of a program honoring the Noted Alabama folklorist Ruby Pickens Tartt. Unfortunately, these type of lacquer discs were fragile and over the years would begin to peel and flake resulting in the usually irretrievalble loss of data. Also, lacquer discs over the years often grow a layer of palmitic acid on the discs themselves requiring extensive, painstaking and careful cleaning. Such were these discs. As it turns out, two of the discs contained previously unknown perfomances by the great Alabamian folk singers Vera Hall Ward and Anna Grace Dodson. 

 Disc has flaked, resulting in loss of data

 Solutions and brushes used for cleaning and removal of palmitic acid

Donations