Alan Lomax

To Hear Your Banjo Play

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Here’s an amazing 1947 film called, “To Hear Your Banjo Play.”  The story and dialogue were written by Alan Lomax.  The film is narrated by Lomax and features a young Pete Seeger guiding viewers through a brief history of the banjo, American Folk Music and its relevance to modern society.  This film features some of the best of the 1940’s New York folk music scene.  It has the only footage of Woody Guthrie performing in his prime, Margot Mayo’s American Square Dance Group is featured, along with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Butch Hawes and others.  Texas Gladden makes an appearance as well.  This is an incredible film!

Here is some more footage of Woody Guthrie, apparently from the same session as the footage used in “To Hear Your Banjo Play.”  Woody is singing his song, “Ranger’s Command.”  Apparently this footage has only recently come to light.


And don’t forget to check out our good friends at the Old Time Herald Magazine – www.oldtimeherald.org – lots of great articles, reviews and more!

Lomax’s Southern Journey Reissued!

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“People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.” –Alan Lomax, 1960.

Happily, Alan Lomax’s 1959-1960 field recordings from the American South have been reissued on stunning LPs by Mississippi Records out of Portland, OR.  The reissue was currated by Down Home Radio friend Nathan Salsburg over at the Alan Lomax Archive/Association for Cultural Equity.  For more information, check out the blog entry at Root Hog Or Die, and be sure to check out Nathan’s awesome online radio show of the same name at EastVillageRadio.com.

Here’s a bit of what Nathan had to say about the reissue.  Read more on his blog entry at RootHogOrDie.com

“Without delving into the twists and turns of the most highly specialized folkloric record business or indulging in musings about its current strange renaissance and the stranger counter-cultural moment from whence it comes, I’m pleased to say that the season of my tenth year with Alan Lomax’s archive also marks the release of five new LPs commemorating Lomax’s most famous field-recording trip: what he called his “Southern Journey” of 1959 and 1960. Production for a commemorative series began exactly a year ago, after I met Eric Isaacson of Portland, Oregon’s Mississippi Records – one of the principals in the unlikely vanguard of the vernacular music LP resurgence – at a panel discussion put on as part of Asheville’s fine Harvest Records’ fifth anniversary festival. While Harvest was turning five, the Southern Journey turned 50, yet there was not a whisper regarding it anywhere (outside of a season-long tribute series in Belgium, put on by the noble Herman Hulsens and the Ancienne Belgique). Adding insult to injury was the fact that not a single release of Southern Journey material was currently in print…” READ MORE

Library of Congress Field Recordings LP

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Here is an early, influential and fantastic album issued by the Library of Congress in 1942.  It was first issued on an album of 78rpm records and then was reissued on this disc early in the LP era.  This record AAFS L2, “Anglo-American Shanties, Lyrics Songs, Dance Tunes and Spirituals from the Archive of American Folk Song,” is the 2nd in the “Folk Music of the United States” series and was edited by Alan Lomax.

There’s some pretty amazing stuff on here.  In fact, all of it is great.  It’s a great record! The field recordings on this album were newly made at the time of the album’s release.  This was the latest hot off the press stuff.  The field recordists who made these recordings, Alan and Elizabeth Lomax, Pete Seeger, Herbert Halpert, Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin are a good representation of the small group of early modern folklorists busy making field recordings of Southern music at that time.

There’s some clutch stuff on here.  These recordings were very influential early on to Pete Seeger, who made several of them, and to the members of the New Lost City Ramblers among others.  Mike Seeger has recorded his own versions of many of the song variants found on this album.

Here’s an unfair question:  How do you think this record, or better this series, of field recordings edited by Alan Lomax and issued in 1942, relates to the Anthology of American Folk Music, composed of commercially recorded 78s, which was edited by Harry Smith and issued in 1952? Contrary to some popular conceptions, there were amazing and influential compilations of folk music issued before the Anthology…
I will continue to post more volumes from this series, but I think this one is my favorite.

CLICK HERE to download the album cut up into tracks.

See below for track information and notes:

Interview with Alan Lomax about Leadbelly

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From the Yurchenco Archives: On today’s show I air an interview Henrietta Yurchenco did with Alan Lomax about Leadbelly.  I’m not sure when this interview was conducted (there was no date on the tape), but I think it was done in the mid 1960’s for one of her broadcasts on WNYC.  Alan Lomax gives a really excellent talk about Leadbelly, about his music and about when he and his father John Lomax first encountered Leadbelly at the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana.  After the interview I play some of the very first field recordings that the Lomax’s made of Leadbelly when they met him that day in 1933, and when they returned to record him again in 1934.  Thanks go to Nathan Salsburg of the Alan Lomax Archive for supplying me with those recordings.

The film posted here is a mid 1930’s “March of Time” newsreel starring Leadbelly and John Lomax playing the parts of themselves in a stylized reenactment of their first meeting and early activities together.

In 1933 John & Alan Lomax were supplied with a portable disc recording machine, the first of its kind, and once they got the hang of using it they proceeded to the first stop on their field recording trip, the Angola State Pen, and the first person they encountered there was Leadbelly. Alan Lomax’s description of this series of events is vivid, and together with the early field recordings I play on the show and the “March of Time” film, you can get a startling connection with that moment in time and space.