Spinner.com (Free subscription) | 27/10/2009
... from the massive sound and film archives recorded in 1936 and '37 by American song collector Alan Lomax during his trips to Haiti. The material, kept in the Library of Congress and long unexamined, was the results of an arduous adventure in which the young Lomax lugged cumbersome recording equipment around on buses (he had no private transportation on the visits) even while...
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub (Free subscription) | 19/10/2009
Who was Alan Lomax? Have you really never heard of him before? Lomax collected folk music, on wire recorders, on tape recorders, in written form, and any other way he could, on farms, at festivals, in jails, at concerts, in churches, on street corners — anywhere people make music. He did it his entire life. He [...]
cowsarejustfood (Free subscription) | 04/11/2009
... wail of blind lemon, that hissing otherworldliness of pre-war ghost recordings re-recaptured by alan lomax. when you’ve made as definitive a statement as rancor keeper, the only aesthetic option is to keep moving, keep changing. you stop, you die. says the shark. and trying to follow that thuggish yowl of pure cthulhuan vinyl evil with more of the same would have been the most redundant...
Earvolution (Free subscription) | 28/10/2009
A dramatized history of Chess Records, Cadillac Records turns out to be a threadbare and homogenized account of the rise of the label’s most well-known stable of stars: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Etta James. The movie peaks early with its opening scenes ripped from the pages of Can’t Be Satisfied, Robert Gordon’s wonderful biography of Muddy Waters with Alan Lomax...
Music 000001 (Free subscription) | 17/10/2009
(With apologies to Simon Johnson and James Kwak .) My great teacher, friend, father-figure, and role model, Alan Lomax, was once heard to declare: "the Pygmies are the baseline." And I was once asked, at a conference in his honor, to explain what that meant. I didn't recall Lomax ever using precisely that expression, but I immediately knew exactly what it meant. Only...
Music 000001 (Free subscription) | 18/10/2009
The reason the revisionist counter-myth is a myth is not because the traditionalist myth is not a myth. Both are "myths." When Colin Turnbull wrote that the Pygmies "may well be the original inhabitants of the great tropical rain forest," or when Alan Lomax wrote of "[t]he Bushman and Pygmy peoples" as "living close to the source of man's known beginnings,"...
Easy Retirement (Free subscription) | 15/10/2009
... Rock Island Line was first recorded by Hudie Ledbetter (or Leadbelly) in the 1930's. Alan Lomax was collecting folk and blues numbers and on his travels with Hudie, heard this sung by a prison gang. Lonnie's recording is described on my posting in May this year: "On July 13th 1954, Chris Barber and his jazz band went into the Decca studios in Maida Vale to record their first...
Scotsman.com Living - Books (Free subscription) | 28/09/2009
... book of the same name, The Ballad Of Britain aspires to be the 21st century equivalent of Alan Lomax's US field recordings of the 1950s, gathering together spontaneous performances taped by Hodgkinson on his travels around the British Isles. The lo-fi results range from a cappella folk ballads to droll Mancunian blues, from an X Factor-style rendition of Summertime to a child singing...
Publishing Genius Press (Free subscription) | 24/09/2009
... popular song by Robert Johnson or something -- what I don't know about the blues you could put in Alan Lomax's books. Michael Kimball is an insanely good talker, it's nuts. He's really coherent and really funny.
