Folklore Podcasts
There are many podcasts in production around the world, exploring a diverse body of folklore and cultural heritage. This page aggregates folklore podcast feeds for you to explore and share.
Know a good podcast about folklore, folklore studies, or professional practice? Share it!
The African American Folklorist
This podcast from the Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation, dedicated to researching, archiving, and raising awareness of Black American traditional music and the Black experience, provides intellectual conversations, historical facts, and vital coverage of African American traditional music.
Alabama Folk
The Alabama Folklife Association’s podcast goes deep with artists and makers who carry on traditions passed down through the generations. Through their lives, we discover the many histories, cultures, communities, and landscapes that make Alabama folk.
America Works
America Works, an ongoing podcast series from the Library of Congress, features the voices of contemporary workers from throughout the United States talking about their lives, their workplaces, and their on-the-job experiences. Drawn from hundreds of longer oral history interviews collected by fieldworkers for the American Folklife Center’s Occupational Folklife Project.
Arts Across NC
Arts Across NC is a podcast by and about the North Carolina Arts Council. Founded in 1967 with the democratic vision of “arts for all citizens,” the North Carolina Arts Council sustains and grows the arts for the benefit of North Carolinians and their communities. Join us as we celebrate the rich history of the arts across North Carolina.
Bluiríní Béaloidis
Bluiríní Béaloidis, from The National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin, is a platform to explore Irish and wider European folk tradition across an array of subject areas and topics, hosted by Jonny Dillon.
Covid Conversations: Life in a Time of Corona
This 12-part series from the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University, produced and presented by folklorist and radio producer Rachel Hopkin in 2020, features two guests in each episode—one from Ohio and one from a different part of the world—who share a specific professional or personal identity. Over the course of their conversation, the paired participants discuss and compare how their parallel involvements in the arts and humanities have informed their experience of life during the Coronavirus pandemic in their respective homes.
Culture Trad Québec
The workshop that smells of wood, the century-old floor resonating with jig steps, the spinning wheel that sings alongside the suspended arrow sash, the moose hide that is about to be tanned, the hands that weave the ash basket… all of the worlds and artisans that the Conseil québécois du patrimoine vivant (CQPV) invites you to meet with the podcast Culture Trad Québec.
Episodes are in French.
The Currents of Folklore
A podcast dedicated to the intersections of folklore and environmental topics. Created by host Charish Bishop, each episode consists of an interview between the host and one or more folklorists whose work falls within this scope, whether that be current research, projects, publications, and more.
Visit the podcast website to stream online and subscribe.
Crimelore
A podcast that examines the intersections between our traditional stories and true crime, with Kristina Downs and Jesse Fivecoate. Available on most podcasting apps.
Digital Folklore
Digital Folklore explores how our online expressions and culture—from scary stories to cat memes—are folklore, with hosts Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus. Digital Folklore uses storytelling, voice acting, interviews, and scripted narrative to analyze various expressions of internet culture through the lens of academic folklore.
Fabulous Folklore with Icy
Hosted by fantasy and Gothic horror writer, Icy Sedgwick, the podcast explores folklore, legends, superstitions, mythology, and all things weird, occult and unusual.
Femlore Podcast (formally Feminist Folklore)
Folklore has been used for generations to share stories across cultures. The podcast hosts ask how the stories we tell influence today’s culture and how we view women. From murder ballads to fairytales, they discuss the power these stories have.
Folklife Today: American Folklife Center
Folklife Today tells stories about the cultural traditions and folklore of diverse communities, combining brand-new interviews and narration with songs, stories, music, and oral history from the collections of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center.
Folklore and Fiction
In The Folklore & Fiction podcast, Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran brings a focus on folklore scholarship aimed at storytellers. Storytellers can learn what folklore is and learn to use it in their craft from the first project ever developed by a professional folklorist for storytellers.
Folklore, Food & Fairytales
A storytelling podcast by Rachel Mosses featuring stories with recipes and food history connected to each episode’s folk story.
The Folklore Podcast
Traditional folklore themes from around the world. One episode each month features a world-class expert from the field of folklore. Recalling forgotten history, recording the new.
The Folklorist Next-Door: Texas Folklife
A cohort of community folklife fellows explore traditional arts, community practices, values, and ritual celebrations in their communities. Fellows participated in a six-month program where they received mentorship, training workshops, and project support from cultural arts non-profit, Texas Folklife, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Topics include foodways, labor, music, and celebrations.
Ghosts and Folklore of Wales
Join Mark Rees for a journey through the weird and wonderful history of Wales. Episodes range from long-lost real-life Welsh ghost stories to the fantastical myths and legends of dragons fighting tooth and claw in the medieval prose tales of the Mabinogion.
How Curious
For KGOU Radio in Oklahoma, host Rachel Hopkin explores Oklahoma legends, tall tales, oddities, and conundrums.
It Still Lives: Foxfire
Foxfire’s mission is to preserve and develop the public’s appreciation for Southern Appalachian history—its history, people, and traditions—through artifacts, oral history, and programs that interpret, document and celebrate the region.
Latine Stories
Latin@ Stories is a podcast born out of the oral history project about Latin@s in Ohio, Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio (ONLO). It seeks to amplify the Latin@ experience with interviews in Spanish, English and Spanglish. More than 200 episodes are available.
Legendary Africa
Join Theshira as she explores the mythical, magical and legendary world of the African continent, including dragons, witches, fairies and magicians, demigods, boy heroes and dragon-slaying princesses, ogres, ghosts, vampires, werehyenas, and Egyptian treasure.
Loremen
Loremen is a podcast about local legends and obscure curiosities from days of yore.
How well do America’s ideals match up to reality? A More Perfect Union, a podcast from the Center for Washington Cultural Traditions, poses this question to different communities in Washington State. Focusing on groups sidelined and sometimes silenced in the American story, listeners will hear from Latine Americans in Wenatchee, LGBTQ+ activists from across eastern Washington, and Black Americans from around the Salish Sea.
The Ma’s House podcast hosted by Director of Production, Hunter Begun, features interviews with artists-in-residence, exhibiting artists, Shinnecock Tribal Members, and special guests related to Ma’s House programming. They are working towards spreading the word about talented artists and having a few laughs. Recorded in Southampton, New York, at Ma’s House on Shinnecock Territory.
Mythos
A storytelling project created by Nicole Schmidt focusing on region and culture-specific folklore from around the world, complete with immersive narrative, lush music…and a dark edge. Experience traditional tales re-imagined and placed in original contexts.
Listen online, or tune in wherever you get your podcasts.
Myths and Legends
Jason Weiser and Carissa Weiser tell stories from myths, legends, and folklore that have shaped cultures throughout history. All the stories, familiar and new, are sourced from world folklore, but retold for modern ears.
New Books in Folklore
Interviews with folklorists and scholars of folklore about their new books, brought to you by the New Books Network, a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing scholars and other serious writers to a wide public via new media.
Soundlore
The official podcast of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. SoundLore’s episodes venture into the research, practices, and projects of folklore and ethnomusicology.
Visit the podcast website to stream online and subscribe.
TellTale: Dakota Folklife and Stories
Enjoy a glimpse into the folklife – and the heart – of North Dakota! TellTale: Dakota Folklife and Stories is a collection of narratives describing the shared personal experiences and lore of life on the North Dakota plains.
Uncanny Japan: Japanese Folklore, Folktales, Myths and Language
Speculative fiction writer, long-term resident of Japan and Bram Stoker Award finalist Thersa Matsuura explores all that is weird from old Japan—strange superstitions, folktales, cultural oddities, and interesting language quirks.
VT Untapped: Vermont Folklife
Experience Vermont through the voices of its own residents—who we were, who we are and who we would like to be. The VT Untapped™ podcast is one more way the Vermont Folklife Center works to make Vermonters more visible to one another and build stronger connections between people.
Western Folklife Center Audio
The Western Folklife Center brings you the voices, faces and places of the rural West. Through features for National Public Radio, documentaries for PBS, CDs, and stories on their blog, WFC tells the stories of people and communities of the West.
What the Folklore?
A comedy podcast that exposes the absurd side of folklore. Each week we read a story, fix plotholes and create new ones, and invent unintended connections between tales.
Yellow and Brown Tales: Asian American Folklife Today
YBT is an exploration of the cultural history of Asian Americans and their lives now, brought to you by the Penn Asian American Studies Program. Acknowledging the many aspects of Asian American life that have been unheard and unseen for “yellow” and “brown” Americans, these stories uplift and showcase their rich expressive culture.
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