Alan Lomax's Massive Archive Goes Online
Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It's part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection — long before the age of the Internet.
Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. He worked from the 1930s to the '90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren't quite sure how to tackle the problem.
"We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible," says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the '80s. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.
"For the first time, everything that we've digitized of Alan's field recording trips are online, on our website," says Fleming. "It's every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music."
"Alan would have been thrilled to death. He would've just been so excited," says Anna Lomax Wood, Lomax's daughter and president of the Association for Cultural Equity. "He would try everything. Alan was a person who looked to all the gambits you could. But the goal was always the same."
Throughout his career, Lomax was always using the latest technology to record folk music in the field and then share it with anyone who was interested. When he started working with his father, John Lomax, in the '30s, that meant recording on metal cylinders. Later, Alan Lomax hauled giant tape recorders powered by car batteries out to backwoods shacks and remote villages.
Lomax wrote and hosted radio and TV shows, and he spent the last 20 years of his career experimenting with computers to create something he called the Global Jukebox. He had big plans for the project. In a 1991 interview with CBS, he said, "The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind."
He imagined a tool that would integrate thousands of sound recordings, films, videotapes and photographs made by himself and others. He hoped the Global Jukebox would make it easy to compare music across different cultures and continents using a complex analytical system he devised — kind of like Pandora for grad students. But the basic idea was simple: Make it all available to anyone, anywhere in the world.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/03/28/148915022/alan-lomaxs-massive-archive-goes-online
Here's where you can hear this amazing music for free:
http://research.culturalequity.org/home-audio.jsp
= new reply since forum marked as read
with musician Wade Ward during the Southern Journey recordings, 1959-1960.
Shirley Collins/Courtesy of Alan Lomax Archive
When I saw the title I immediately thought of this.
http://greenacresepisodereviews.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html
Snip: "Oh, shed a tear for Gertrude!
At the bottom of the sea!
Oh, shed a tear for Gertrude!
And shed a tear for me."
This is the first of the completely loopy episodes. That's possibly why they postponed it a bit.
Molly Turgiss is a local legend in Hooterville. The locals call her "You Know Who". If you say her name, something will fall off the wall, shatter or...something will fly across the room and hit you in the behind. Mr. Douglas nails it: "Poltergeist". Molly was an ugly girl who grew up to be an ugly woman. Apparently, the townsfolk taunted her out of town. Now, her spirit punishes the people of Hooterville through random annoyances. I love how she keeps driving people's cars away and parking them illegally in different towns. Such a very simple but oh-boy-funny! idea.
I started watching this show back in 1985 in the middle of the sixth season. When the show looped back to the start, I still loved it to pieces but...this was the first episode I watched where I thought "Oh, here's that show I started watching." And, after watching the world of GA go up around the Douglases, I was as with it and as invested as they were. So, when they mention a "legend" and a possible ghost...I was anxious to see what happens.
FULL story at link.
Have a good day yurbud!
Added the link to my favorites! I just listened to your post of Pretty Boy Floyd, lovemydog, great pictures that go along with the tune.
Fabulous find, thank you! 
Yeah, I love that Woody Guthrie song Pretty Boy Floyd.
I'm glad others have an interest in this music too. I'm especially interested in hearing some of the music Alan Lomax recorded in the Caribbean.
Hope you're enjoying a good day & evening.
It seems to be phone call catch up night here. However I told them both about the NPR link.
Best to you my friend~
I didn't know you were into folk music Hekate. That's great.
I've been rediscovering some old folk stuff there on that site, and also listening to some stuff on youtube like Fairport Convention, Steeley Span, Jean Ritchie. I love all the intersections where folk & blues meet & converge.
Especially tracing it back from the rock & roll music that I love. Like, I learned Gallows Pole from Led Zepellin, then learn it was a very old song with many derivations. Same goes for Where Did You Sleep Last Night, which I first heard from Nirvana.
As Muddy Waters once sang 'the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll'.
