Alan Lomax RIP

NYTimes has article about this as well http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/arts/music/the-alan-lomax-collection-from-the-american-folklife-center.html?src=me&ref=general

Still need to read that bio.

THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING.

Go nuts:

http://www.cmj.com/news/listen-to-alan-lomax-s-audio-field-recordings-online/

brilliant, thanks for the heads up!

Oh, I had it on my calendar to check but there it is :)
Excited to dig in during midterms week!!

oh, i just came to post about this, guess i was a little late on the scene. sorting by location is a fun way to browse it. the people of fort-de-france, martinique sure know their way around a dance tune.

1) That archive totally rules super wow style, everyone should spend at least an hour looking around and listening to it as a citizen of the world

2) At the record store yesterday I saw a 7-LP vinyl version of the Sounds of the South box set (which I bought on CD a zillion years ago). I wouldn't buy it again, but if anyone is buying it for the first time, GET THAT. (Not sure if this is a new release or oop or what -- it was just on the wall and I made the clerk take it down so I could ogle/look at it)

Also there was nothing on the outside packaging indicating Shirley Collins' involvement, which I found disappointing. I can't believe she hasn't gotten more credit for participating in the recording of this totally essential American folk document!

'Get In Union : Bessie Jones with the Georgia Sea Island Singers and Others' - 2CD set out on Tompkins Square, October 28th

https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000091105193-yminis-t500x500.jpg?e76cf77

Bessie Jones was one of the most popular performers on the 1960s and '70s folk circuit, appearing-usually at the helm of the Georgia Sea Island Singers-at colleges, festivals, the Poor People's March on Washington, and Jimmy Carter's inauguration. "Get In Union" is a collection of her classic recordings with the Singers, combined with many previously unavailable solo and small-group performances captured by Alan Lomax between 1959 and 1966.

Alan Lomax first visited the Georgia Sea Island of St. Simons in June of 1935 with folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle and author Zora Neale Hurston. There they met the remarkable Spiritual Singers Society of Coastal Georgia, as the group was then called, and recorded several hours of their songs and dances for the Library of Congress. Returning 25 years later, Lomax found that the Singers were still active, and had been enriched by the addition of Bessie Jones, a South Georgia native with a massive collection of songs going back to the slavery era. Over the next several years, Lomax and Jones worked together to present, promote, and teach Southern black folk song across the country, from nightclubs to elementary schools. "Get In Union" features freshly remastered audio from 24-bit digital transfers of Lomax's original tapes and notes by the Alan Lomax Archive's Nathan Salsburg and Anna Lomax Wood, who accompanied her father on his 1960 recordings of Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers.

https://soundcloud.com/tompkinssquare/get-in-union

ah wonderful!

(and thankfully they're putting it out on CD, not like those elitist mississippi records lomax vinyl reissues that went out of print almost instantly)

^^

Yes

stuff i've heard from this is pretty amazing.

yup she's a revelation

Tompkins square does a good job, I hope they keep going forever.

http://research.culturalequity.org/home-audio.jsp

^^ Pretty much all of Lomax's recorded audio, I think?

Oh i see upthread that this is old news. Whoops!

So I just moved next door to the dude that wrote this:

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/55qpr7zm9780252036880.html

He basically told me that I can borrow his records at any point. Super excited to dig into his stuff

haha, i would take advantage of his offer!

More good stuff:

http://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/01/nearly-300000-lomax-documents-now-accessible-online/

wow

Kinda big news from the archive just now:

https://archive.culturalequity.org/

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) is pleased to announce the launch of the Lomax Digital Archive. The site provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948), and was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanties’ NEH Cares program.

For nearly ten years, ACE has hosted online the entirety of Alan Lomax’s photographs and tape recordings—made throughout the US and the world between 1946 and 1991—as well as transcriptions of his 1940s radio programs, and a selection of clips from his film and video-work of the 1970s and 1980s. The LDA offers all of this material through a totally redesigned user interface, with more intuitive search and browse functions, as well as easy embeddability and instant social-media sharing on the item (recording/photo/video) level.

The LDA also expands the old site exponentially through the inclusion of collections compiled by the Lomaxes under the auspices of the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song between 1933 and 1942. First and foremost, these include the entire 70 hours of their Kentucky recordings and the 39 hours of Mississippi recordings. This latter material includes the first recordings of Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Sid Hemphill. Although this material has been issued in assorted iterations over the years, the LDA makes it possible to listen to them in their entirety in their original recording contexts. As funds become available to digitize and catalog other collections from this period, they will become available here. (These collections include recordings made by several of Alan's collaborators, among them John W. Work III and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, and are presented here in partnership with ACE’s colleagues at the LC’s American Folklife Center.)

The catalogs are searchable and browsable by a range of taxonomies (performers, instrument, location, genre, etc.) and every recording and image is described by extensive item-level metadata. Nothing is left out — every microphone check and struck tuning fork is included.

Lastly, a crucial aspect of the LDA is its capacity for exhibits, which will allow for thoughtful, context-rich explorations into specific aspects of the collections: be they instruments, locations, traditions, performers, or themes. The inaugural presentation is Trouble Won’t Last Always, which compiles the several dozen performances that comprised ACE’s daily song series of the same name, launched in the early days of the pandemic. Trouble consists of recordings from across the Lomax collections that speak to themes of loneliness, isolation, optimism, endurance, transcendence, selected and annotated by LDA curator Nathan Salsburg, and with an introduction by Dom Flemons, the American Songster.

Thanks. Want to dig in and or at least listen to Muddy Waters

amazing! been hoping they would do something like this with that material for a while

whoa!!