A vast trove of songs and interviews recorded by legendary folklorists alan lomax Music from the 1940s to the 1990s has been digitized and available for free online. The Cultural Equity Association, a nonprofit founded by Lomax in the 1980s, posted: Approximately 20,000 recordings.
Don Fleming, executive director of cultural equity, says it’s a “first time” He told NPR’s Joel Rose.“All of Alan’s digitized field recording trips are on a website online. It’s every take, from beginning to end. The fake takes, the interviews, the music.”
Great resource. To give you a quick taste, here are some examples from one of Lomax’s most well-known areas of research: records of African American traditional culture.
But that’s just scratching the surface huge archive. Lomax’s work extended far beyond the Deep South to other regions and cultures in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. “He believed all cultures should be seen on a level playing field,” his daughter Anna Lomax Wood told NPR. “They’re not all the same. But they should be given the same dignity. Otherwise they had the same dignity and worth as anyone else.”
you can Listen to Rose’s article about the archives on the NPR website,but also, Interview with Lomax by Terry Gross in 1990 fresh airincludes sample recordings of Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Mississippi Fred McDowell. To explore the Lomax audio archive, you can: Search our huge collection View by artist, date, genre, country, and other categories.
Note: An earlier version of this post first appeared on our site in March 2012.
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