"The business of documenting the expressive culture of the world." That's how Anna Chairetakis Lomax describes her father's work. Is there anything quite like Alan Lomax's achievement, not just in the history of music, but in history, period? Remove his work and everything changes.
Beginning in 1932 with the song collection American Ballads and Folk Songs, Lomax (under the tutelage of his father, John Lomax) began to form an unprecedented audience and influence for folk or popular music. Alan Lomax made the first recordings of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Muddy Waters; was the first to use a portable tape recorder in the field; published in 1967 a potent collection of blues and labor ballads called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People; issued a seminal 1968 study on popular culture, Folk Song Style and Culture; and in 1993 completed a great memoir and study of the blues, The Land Where the Blues Began.
In what will amount to more than 100 CDs, Rounder has begun issuing The Alan Lomax Collection, starting with a 38-song sampler that draws from representative recordings made in the U.S., the U.K., the Caribbean, Spain, Italy and elsewhere. It's a breathtaking disc, expansive yet revelatory of the economy and vitality that marks folk music everywhere. Lomax was an ardent voice for music that, as he saw it, was becoming voiceless. "What was once an ancient tropical garden of immense color and variety is in danger of being replaced by comfortable but sterile and sleep-inducing cultural super-highways -- with just one type of diet available and one available kind of music...when it will be too late -- when the whole world is bored with automated mass-distributed video-music, our descendants will despise us for having thrown away the best of our culture," Lomax wrote in a May 1960 article for HiFi/Stereo Review that's reprinted in the liner notes of the sampler disc.
Lomax, 82, recently suffered two debilitating strokes; his daughters, Anna and Bess, have been helping carry on the work of the new collection. I spoke recently with Anna Lomax Chairetakis about her father's work. She defined it this way: "I think if you compare it to archaeology, you find something really important, buried in a layer of sediment. A fragment of bone or a beautiful piece of pottery. You have to delicately work around it and lift it out intact. You really have to focus on that object, that thing and bringing it out."
The collection tells the story of individual spirits and a collective spirit, and Lomax knew how to preserve the genius of both. The sound quality itself deserves mention: The voices are perfectly established, and even the ensemble pieces afford a live, clean sonic separation. Many studio recordings from the same time sound like a soup can telephone game in comparison.
"He understood some things about miking that I've never been able to learn," Chairetakis says. "He looked into getting the best equipment he could afford and bring into the field. And he learned by doing it for a long time. In addition to having a good sense of how to position mikes, how to ride the volume, do simple equalization, he really did it with his heart and soul. He himself was very excited about what he was doing and he communicated that to people. They just realized that this was a very important moment for them, not just personally, but that they were part of something very important."
And their music is awesome.
There's no way to do justice to all the musicians on The Southern Journey, but one is astonished at the effortless intensity of their performances, a quality to which Lomax was acutely sensitive. "Rather than sit there for a long time...[Lomax] would cut through very quickly to the heart of things and still people felt comfortable about it," Chairetakis explains. "He was very interested in the oldest level of material, that's what he called it. He was well aware that people knew all kinds of stuff...but he was interested in the primary level, what was most representative of their tradition."
Southern Journey -- the collective title for the first six volumes of the massive collection -- traces Lomax's path in 1959 and '60, covering every song released on the original Prestige series as well as many unreleased songs. Rather than following Lomax chronologically on his song hunts, the material is organized thematically and regionally. The music rises up through the lives of the singers, and that spirit comes to you like a blood transfusion.
Volume 1 serves as a road map to the other five CDs and is titled Voices from the American South, consisting of blues, ballads, hymns, reels, shouts, chanteys and work songs. It begins with one of the last recordings from the Southern trips, a 1960 recording of Bessie Jones, a singer from St. Simon's Island, Georgia. A cane fife draws out a mysterious melody as Jones sings, "Oh day, yonder come day...Day done broke now in my soul." It's the sound of a voice that has absorbed traditions extending as if beyond time. 17 songs in, a black Pentecostal church service in Memphis is documented; the entire flaring interchange -- wailing, calling, testifying -- is transcribed in the liner notes.
Volume 2 focuses on Lomax's recordings in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the land that produced the Stanleys and the Carters, and emphasizes the work of banjo frailer Wade Ward, guitar and fiddle virtuoso Hobart Smith, and singer Texas Gladden. The 26 ballads and breakdowns included here are the unvarnished bedrock of modern country and bluegrass.
Volume 3 follows Lomax down Highway 61 and includes the disappearing tradition of the work song or chant, spirituals, and the first recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sid Hemphill, a blind musician who played pan-pipes or quills. One of the most quietly stirring performances is offered by Hemphill's daughter, Rose, who sings a desolate blues called "Rollin and Tumbling".
Volume 4 is titled Brethren, We Meet Again; it captures the central tradition of Southern Protestant sacred music, both in church and out. Some of the oldest strains of American folk music are represented here. Spoken testimonies segue into rising hymns in the Old Regular Baptist services. Hobart Smith appears again, performing the black spiritual "See That My Grave is Kept Clean".
Volume 5 presents 17 outlaw ballads from a variety of traditions and recorded all across the South, including several performances from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the most striking of which is the previously unreleased voice of Ed Lewis singing his version of "John Henry" accompanied only by the sound of his ax striking wood.
Volume 6 is another overview of religious material, centered around the sliding boundary between the sacred and the sinful. Of special note is Vera Ward Hall's "No Room at the Inn" and her oral narrative retelling the story of the nativity. "Alan thought she was one of the great African-American singers of her time," Chairetakis said. "She had immense vision and soul and repertoire."
The next set of discs in the Lomax Collection will be titled Prison Songs. Chairetakis explained how she took some of these songs, recorded 50 years ago, to the Bronx prison and played them for some inmates. "They said the most wonderful things. They related to it immediately. They said things like, 'They suffered so we wouldn't have to suffer.' And they loved that it was created by these people themselves and not manufactured. Sometimes people say, 'Who cares, it's only historical?' But these men related immediately. They said, 'This was the music of hope.'"
Comments ()