Who should be in the Hall? Nov 23, 2008
Front page news - newsjournalonline. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2008. (Daytona Beach News Journal)
At 93, a Delta blues legend carries on Nov 14, 2008
Edwards unexpectedly stepped into blues history on a summer afternoon in 1942, when Library of Congress musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax heard him playing guitar in the court square of Friars Point, Miss. Impressed by Edwards's feel and phrasing (it was the same trip on which he recorded Muddy Waters and Son House), Lomax arranged a recording session in a makeshift studio in Clarksdale, but the plan was almost undone when a tornado roared through. (Boston Globe)
Americana Museum project to kick off withGuthrie show Sep 18, 2008
Together, they recorded radio plays with Alan Lomax, toured migrant work camps to lift the spirits of the workers, and in the 1950s and '60s sang often on Theatricum's stage. It was at Theatricum Botanicum that Guthrie gave his last performance before succumbing to Huntington's chorea in 1967. (Los Angeles Daily News)
REQUIRED READING Aug 24, 2008
In her Boerum Hill apartment, Petrusich picks through her crate of old LPs, "plugging in an old suitcase record player . . . broadcast[ing] the hottest songs I could think of: thick, crackling Delta blues." From there, the author takes a journey, like a modern-day Alan Lomax, to find today's Americana and what's left of the roots of that music. She's got just the right pitc 00004000 h.. (New York Post -- Opinions)
Piney Woods School to receive Blues Trail marker Aug 16, 2008
They began singing on campus in 1936 and were recorded the next year by folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress. After graduation, they worked as the Jackson Harmoneers and later as he Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, popularizing the hard gospel style of quartet singing. (The Clarion-Ledger)
`Level 41': Tye's dance concert took decades to create Jun 4, 2008
Tye said the opening dance, ``Going Home,'' features the music of Alan Lomax. It's a 30-minute piece, but I'll only be doing a 10-minute excerpt. (Kalamazoo Gazette, MI)
John Work III gets his due Mar 16, 2008
Work was already an established composer when he and two other Fisk researchers - sociologist Lewis Wade Jones and graduate student Samuel C. Adams Jr. - joined the renowned folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress for a field study of the Mississippi Delta in 1941 and '42 ... While working on a biography of Waters in the late '90s, author Robert Gordon found most of the lost manuscripts in a file cabinet at the Alan Lomax Archive in New York. (Boston Globe)
Exhibit shows man's work of recording black folk music Mar 1, 2008
" Work was already an established composer when he and two other Fisk researchers - sociologist Lewis Wade Jones and graduate student Samuel C. Adams Jr. - joined the renowned folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress for a field study of the Mississippi Delta in 1941 and '42. The men focused on Mississippi's Coahoma County, where they gathered data on everything from automobile ownership to jukebox selections. But their greatest contribution would be to popular music. They collected over... (Athens Banner-Herald)
Give Me That Old-Time Singing Jan 18, 2008
Almost every revived American folk-music form was once recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist Alan Lomax. He taped Sacred Harp in 1942 and '59. (Time.com)
Henrietta Yurchenco, 91; chronicled music traditions Dec 15, 2007
There she made friends with Burl Ives, the folk singer, and Alan Lomax, a music collector. In 1941, she followed her husband on a trip to Mexico. (Boston Globe)
Music is in our genes Dec 11, 2007
The work, presented late November at the American Anthropological Associations annual meeting in Washington DC, compares modern genetic data to a catalogue of traditional songs gathered in the 1950s and 1960s by ethnographer Alan Lomax. Lomax, best known for his recordings of American folk music and his popularization of singers such as Woodie Guthrie and Lead Belly, collected some 5,500 songs from 857 cultures. (Nature News Service)
John Work: A folklorist's window into 1940s black music Dec 6, 2007
Two years ago, the book "Lost Delta Found" criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Randall Franks: Just doodlin' around Nov 30, 2007
Folklorist Alan Lomax sought out the group to document and feature in his PBS documentary An Appalachian Journey for the American Patchwork series. They also starred in the PBS series Tonight at Ferlinghetti s. In its career, the group recorded about 100 songs of which I had the honor of fiddling about 60. (Catoosa County News, GA)
Rounder Records has an eclectic roster Nov 27, 2007
He points to various times in the label's history when it would simultaneously release albums of Ethiopian music, Alan Lomax field recordings, and records by George Thorogood and Jonathan Richman. "I think it's really no different that we're putting stuff out like the Plant/Krauss thing or Ann Wilson or Ween. I think we're just getting more successful with them as time goes on.". (Boston Globe)
Sketches and songs Nov 24, 2007
" MULTIMEDIA AUDIO: Listen to "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down" by Sister Fleeta Mitchell and the Rev. Willie Mae Eberhart from "Art of Field Recording," Volume I: to see this player. Dust-to-Digital has released a number of sets since, but Ledbetter estimates Rosenbaum's to be "one of the most thoroughly documented field recordings in history" because of Rosenbaum's multi-faceted approach. Rosenbaum not only recorded the music, he sketched and painted the musicians he met into his visual... (Athens Banner-Herald)
The soul of a punk Nov 21, 2007
The sound of Joe Strummer shouting his vocal "White Noise" into a microphone could have been an Alan Lomax field recording, an explosion of inner turmoil finding musical expression, until the rest of the band comes in and you recognize it as the Clash circa 1977. That's one of the moments Julien Temple captures in his documentary, "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," which spans Strummer's pre-Clash hippie days, his post-Clash isolation, and the days before his death from a congenital heart... (Boston Globe)
Reviving the Revival Nov 15, 2007
In a 1959 essay "Folk Song Style," published in American Anthropologist, folk historian Alan Lomax said that old time music "give[s] the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work-any or all of these personality-shaping experiences." By the 1930s and 1940s, the genre was derided as "primitive," and fell out of fashion with mainstream... (Ithaca Times, NY)
Communist or not?How author George Orwell's politics confused the spies Sep 5, 2007
American musician Alan Lomax was put under surveillance by MI5 as a potential communist, and his BBC TV shows in the early 1950s were monitored by Special Branch. The BBC was informed that Lomax was in contact with the Hungarian press attache in London, although that could have been linked to his interest in folk dancing. (BBC News -- Europe)
News: why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade Sep 5, 2007
"The file contains a cutting from the Manchester Guardian in September 1938, noting that Orwell had signed the Joint Peace Manifesto alongside the Peace Pledge Union, the Quakers and the Labour party. Two years earlier, the chief constable of Wigan had requested information about the writer, who had been seen addressing Communist party meetings in the town.There are also details from his passport application, noting: "height 6ft 2ins, eyes grey, hair brown, tattoo marks on the backs of both... (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Tommy Makem, 74, hero of Irish folk music, dies Aug 4, 2007
After one of their first appearances, Pete Seeger, the folk singer, and Alan Lomax, the folklorist and musicologist, encouraged them. Bob Dylan, in the early days of his career, solicited songwriting tips from Makem. (International Herald Tribune)
Good reasons to celebrate '38 Aug 3, 2007
"White Lies for Lomax," a commissioned work by recent Tanglewood alumnus Mason Bates, was smoky jazz-club improvisation with a snatch of Southern work song, taped in the '30s by Alan Lomax, stuck on the very end, an afterthought one wishes had been an organic part of the piece. In his Bagatelles for piano and percussion, amid breathtaking virtuosic jazzy riffs, Milburn found a place for different moods, and quotes from "West Side Story" and the medieval plainchant "Dies Irae.". (Boston Globe)
Today in History July 19 Jul 19, 2007
Celebrated musicologist Alan Lomax died in Safety Harbor, Fla. at age 87. (MSNBC -- Race)
Loin-lovin' lyrics May 9, 2007
In his landmark book The Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax writes of the tune Tight Like That and the whole loin-loving genre, noting an "unconflicted and happy eroticism" ringing out. Muldaur hears it the same way. (Globe and Mail -- Entertainment)
Guitarist hits the back roads Apr 6, 2007
Recalling the musicological field trips of Alan Lomax or Chris Strachwitz, Ten Days Out chronicles a 2004 journey through Shepherd's native South to jam with blues artists, from world legends (B.B. King, at his annual homecoming show in Indianola, Miss. to regional favorites (Louisiana's Buddy Flett and Bryan Lee, who both helped give the teenaged Shepherd his start). (Akron Beacon Journal, OH -- Entertainment)
Music: An insider's trip through the '60s Mar 16, 2007
Recounting the Newport festival, he describes not the familiar legend of shocked crowds, but the backstage consternation of Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, who demanded that Boyd turn down the volume. (He didn't. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
'Bruce blew my cover' Feb 1, 2007
His parents were helping famous folk team John and Alan Lomax to transcribe songs recorded in the south. Woody Guthrie was persuaded to come to Washington to record them and Seeger accompanied him in the studio. (Guardian Unlimited)
The Ecstasy of Influence Jan 31, 2007
In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled Country Blues, Waters described how he came to write it. (Harper's Magazine)
Brazilian music Jan 30, 2007
SO PAULO: From the mid-1930s onward, the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax led expeditions into the Deep South, searching for authentic blues and folk singers. Thanks to those efforts, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie made their first recordings and a template for American popular music was set. (International Herald Tribune)
