  Introduction
Thanks for visiting.
My name is Douglas Turner Day IV. I am a musician. a folklorist, an oral historian, and a documentarian of folklife and folklore in the U. S .of A.
For over 35 years I have performed as a solo musician, accompanying myself on six- and 12-string guitars in a style rooted in the fingerstyle country blues of the Piedmont region where I grew up. I have also played in rock, gospel, blues and country bands. I still perform and teach, and cannot imagine life without music.
And for over 20 years I've also been a professional folklorist, with an MA and a Ph. D. in the subject. I have made living working, for the most part, in the non-profit domain.
I've done contract ethnographic fieldwork (oral history and cultural surveys) in Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi.
I've worked for local, state, regional, and national arts and humanities organizations.
I have interviewed, recorded, and written about: blues, old-time, bluegrass, rock'n'roll, gospel, country, tex-mex, jazz and R&B, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Indian, Persian, Congolese, and Senegalese musicians . . . woodcarvers, potters, weavers, quilters, furniture makers, basketmakers, turners, embroiderers, painters and sculptors . . . fishermen, dairy farmers, firefighters, cooks, mill workers, shopkeepers, preachers, policemen, politicians, and poultry workers . . . numbers-runners, moonshiners, pot farmers, and other minor local criminals. (A lot of these categories overlapped in a single individual.)
A few high points of my tenure there were:
- the preservation and digitization of the Russell "Rip" Payne Collection, thousands of images, the life's work of a local freelance and news photographer;
- the preservation of a large collection of 150 paintings by local folk painter Frances Brand;
- and the enlistment of the Society in the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project (for which I continue to train interviewers for the American Folklore Society).
Over the years, I've also been a dishwasher; a warehouseman on Tchopitulas Street on New Orleans; a truck driver out of Metairie, Louisiana, I've been a hospital janitor, a "property manager" for a rental agent, an AM radio ad salesman, and a "financial editor" for a major NY publisher in Charlottesville, Virginia. I've been a newspaper reporter (farm and police beats) in the central Shenandoah Valley. And I've been an adjunct instructor of cultural anthropology at UT-Chattanooga.
I am a husband, father, son-in-law, uncle, Sunday School teacher, and Episcopal vestryman.
Thanks largely to Dubya's Second Great Depression, I am again an independent folklorist and middle-aged folksinger.
Have camera and tape recorder (and guitar), will travel.
Douglas Turner Day IV |
