There was a story I often heard growing up in Cape Breton. The story revolved around a short documentary film made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and aired on national television called Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler (1972). Often the person telling the story would chuckle after the title, or respond with a “yeah right…the myth of the vanishing fiddler!”. Ultimately, one would be regaled with stories of hundreds of fiddlers gathering at the Glendale Festival the summer immediately after the film aired, to “show the world” that there are still lots of fiddlers in Cape Breton. As Marie Thompson (Reference Thompson2006) explained, while the thesis of the vanishing Cape Breton fiddler may not have been widely accepted by locals, it continues to have, none-the-less, significant ongoing impacts on traditional music on Cape Breton Island.

The film, the response, the impacts, and the stories about it, all generate a recursion that is of tremendous ethnomusicological interest. And while this kind of observation is not new to ethnomusicologists and folklorists, what is new is the return of these once provocative media in new forms. They are now returning in a kind of digital afterlife, renegade archives housed on freely accessible streaming formats that skirt around “official” editorial and curatorial oversight. On first reflection, it is the return of old content. But on second reflection, this streaming content is offering new possibilities for original research of its role in the emerging digital cultural memory, and as media that might be further incorporated in experimental and archiveological ethnographic films (Russell Reference Russell1999, Reference Russell2018). I had never seen the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler until recently when I found it streaming on the site of a small Toronto-based online radio station celticradio.net. I believe that responding to online streaming provokes new research questions for audiovisual ethnomusicology and cine-ethnomusicologists (Harbert Reference Harbert2018).

With these questions in mind, open source internet resources like Folkstreams become increasingly important for research and teaching in audiovisual ethnomusicology. While Folkstreams’ statement mission is to “find, preserve, contextualize, and stream documentary films on American folklife,” it has a wider value for contemporary audiovisual ethnomusicology as its preservation activities contribute to an emerging digital cultural memory, that is as yet, little theorised.

While I am not a scholar of American music, nor do I teach traditional music (I teach on a jazz and contemporary pop music programme), I make regular use of these films as examples of approaches to the documentation of music, as a way of visualising the interconnections of music, culture, religion, and environment, and as a platform for a discussion of research ethics. Of course, I also use these films in line with their primary function, as a document of traditional cultural practices. We watch these films, however, in ways that the filmmakers themselves could not have considered. We view the films for their content, for the way this content was packaged at the time of its production, and also from a critical orientation, analysing the impacts that the digital afterlife has on the development of performance style. Some production oriented viewers may view the content for how it can be remixed, repackaged into other digital products. This orientation encourages the development of a criticality towards media that is quite common in media and film studies, but less developed in our field.

The films on the site are overwhelmingly made by independent filmmakers about relatively unknown artists and tradition bearers. The site is organised by a drop-down menu of alphabetised categories that covers a wide range of topics. Though I primarily make use of the music category, I also use the Canada, Caribbean, Dance, Festival, Folkmusic Revival, and Social Justice/Protest films. I expect that because I am always seeking films about music, I could find every film I want under the music category. However, because of how the search feature works it can be hard to find the content that you are looking for. This is a consequence of what is best about Folkstreams: it is a curated site of independent filmmakers making films about content that is devilishly hard to monetise yet none-the-less significant. We may wish the site to be richer or easier to use, but then it would cost more money. And the way that the site is curated provides some rich opportunities for original research. To give you a sense of what I think is most valuable about the site, I will illustrate two examples of films that offer pragmatic learning outcomes.

Take for instance two films in the Folkmusic Revival section: John Cohen’s The High Lonesome Sound (1963) and Davenport and Dornfeld’s Remembering the High Lonesome (2003), which features, as the title suggests, John Cohen remembering the context and production of The High Lonesome Sound. In Remembering, Cohen reflects, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century on his process of becoming a filmmaker, his desire to bring image and sound together so that an audience could feel the music in a particular way. We learn that Cohen’s interest in filmmaking developed out of the alternative art scene rather than as an academic exercise to document culture, which included Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginsberg. Cohen was already a photographer and founding member of the important folk revival group the New Lost City Ramblers. With The High Lonesome, he made an important mark on how American roots music continues to be understood—what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.” As Cohen reflects on his intentions, his luck, and on some details of the film’s production, we are provided a masterclass in cine-ethnomusicology that students can then bring to their experience of The High Lonesome Sound and to their contemporary experience of watching or producing ethnographic films about music culture.

There are negative examples as well that highlight not only changes in cine-ethnomusicological techniques but how ethical practices have impacted research methods and representation. Alan Lomax’s film The Land Where the Blues Began (1979) is a complex film from today’s perspective and provides an opportunity to talk about the impact that researchers have on narrative and on shaping history. Where Cohen’s starting point was personal interest in unfolding an experience with a particular musician and musical form, Lomax presents a narrative on the formation of the blues as American music that is often a forced patchwork of biographies tied together by television conventions rather than research, to create a singular foundational American popular music. While the on-location performances and audio recording are much more polished than Cohen’s roughly made film, Lomax’s production lacks engagement with the musicians, turning many of the performers into little more than objects that viewers are meant to observe. Conversations with my students after the film tend to focus on a politics of representation and questions of research ethics and how these ethics are oriented by national politics.

I have discussed only three of the 113 films about music currently available on Folkstreams. I have chosen to take this approach rather than simply survey the content because I want to give potential users a way of approaching the films. There is a massive amount of content on the site and, because most of the subjects will not be known to students, I have found that providing a methodological prompt helps to orient students in their viewing.

Folkstreams is an important resource for teachers and students of folk music, folklore, ethnomusicology and cine-ethnomusicology. One can approach the content directly as a document of traditional music and, as I have tried to show, use the content as a historic document that can be situated and unpacked, and as an example of the emergence of digital cultural memory. Because the site is freely available, it does not add to your library’s resources and does not require getting beyond a paywall. These alone are bonuses. My struggles with the site are a consequence of this free access. In an era of slick online streaming, the rudimentary nature of the site may throw off users at first, but once you start digging into the content you will find in this site a tremendous resource that will entertain and challenge for years to come.