Smithsonian Folkways x Alabama Chanin

While I was working on-site for the Smithsonian, I had the luck of sharing a floor with legacy label, Folkways Recordings. I listened to hundreds of global songs and soundscapes and read hundreds of detailed liner notes.

The experience of hearing portraits of people and communities forever altered the way I lived and conducted fieldwork. Years later, I took under-selling Folkways t-shirts and teamed up with designer Natalie Chanin to have them cut and reassembled Alabama Chanin style.

Sold in my shop, Wilderness of Wish, these shirts, crafted by the Southern seamstresses of the CFDA award-winning clothing label Alabama Chanin, invoked not only Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s sage wisdom, they also honored the Smithsonian Institution’s pioneering record label, Folkways Recordings, and the values of hand-sewing and repurposed materials.

Notice the knots with trailing thread, the cross-stitch and piecework holding it all together.

Now, as ever, we need our music and our voices to surround hate...and force it to surrender.