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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (Dover Books on Music)
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In the 1930s and 40s, a father-and-son team of folklori...)
In the 1930s and 40s, a father-and-son team of folklorists hit the highways, byways and rural routes of the United States, traveling in a battered pickup truck laden with primitive recording equipment. John A. Lomax and his son, Alan, covered thousands of miles, stopping off at tarpaper shacks, juke joints, prison yards, and other out-of-the-way places to listen to native singers and to record them for the Library of Congress archives. The Lomaxes made over 10,000 field recordings, and from this vast collection they compiled a hugely successful series of anthologies, beginning with the widely acclaimed American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934. That collection was followed by the present volume in 1941.
Here are the music and words to some 200 songs recorded at the state penitentiary in Milledgeville, Georgia, in Michigan lumber camps, Louisiana rice fields, on Western cattle trails, and in many other locales around the nation. A beguiling mix of the familiar and the rare, the tunes range from spirituals and other songs of faith to chain-gang work chants and field hollers, as well as game songs, lullabies, courting songs, Cajun airs, breakdowns, and many more. Well-known standards such as "Hush Li'l' Baby," "Old Blue," "John Henry," and "Jack o' Diamonds" appear alongside less-familiar tunes, including "The Lady Who Loved a Swine," "You Kicked and Stomped and Beat Me," and the miners' lament, "Oh, My Liver and My Lungs."
This new edition features an informative introduction by award-winning author Judith Tick, a faculty member at Northeastern University. Notes on tune origins, two indexes, and an extensive bibliography round out this important archive of authentic folk songs and ballads.
Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly "King of the Twelve-string Guitar Players of the World," Long-time Convict in the Penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana
(orange cloth no dj..Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Bell...)
orange cloth no dj..Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly "King of The Twelve-String Guitar Players of The World," Long-Time Convict in the Penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana. Transcribed, Selected and Edited by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax. Published by The Macmillan Company, New York - 1936. First Edition. An important collection of Lead Belly's finest work.
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, musicologist and folklorist.
Background
John Avery Lomaxwas born on September 23, 1867 in Goodman, Mississippi, United States, one of the five sons of James Avery Lomax, a farmer, and Susan Frances (Cooper) Lomax, both natives of Georgia. Although they always worked their own land, Lomax described his family as belonging to the "upper crust of the po' white trash. " In 1869 they moved to a farm on the Bosque River near Meridian, Texas. From his country childhood, Lomax acquired a love for and appreciation of the rural folklore he later captured on record. He absorbed the popular hymns he heard at the Methodist camp meetings his family attended and the songs of his cowboy friends.
Education
Lomax spent one year (1887 - 1888) at a Methodist school, Granbury (Texas) College. Eager to advance his education, Lomax attended the summer school in Chautauqua, New York, for three years. In 1895, at twenty-eight, he entered the University of Texas, where he took courses with feverish enthusiasm and received his Bachelor of Arts degree two years later. Then he pursued graduate studies despite financial constraints. After receiving the Master of Arts in literature in 1906 from the University of Texas, he went to study English at Harvard, where he also earned the Master of Arts degree.
Career
Lomax was a teacher for seven years, six of them at Weatherford College, another Methodist institution. From 1897 to 1903, Lomax served at the University of Texas simultaneously as registrar, secretary to the president, and steward of men's dormitories, among other offices, for $75 a month. Thereafter, he became instructor and then associate professor of English at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (1903 - 1910).
Since childhood Lomax had been writing down the cowboy songs he heard. His English professor at Texas had scorned such frontier literature as unworthy, but at Harvard, Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge strongly encouraged Lomax to continue his collecting. After his return to Texas from Harvard, they secured him three successive fellowships that enabled him to travel through the cattle country with a notebook and a primitive recording machine. Around campfires and in saloon backrooms he persuaded cowboys to sing their songs. Among his findings were the well-known "Git Along Little Dogies" and "Home on the Range, " the latter sung to him by a Negro saloonkeeper in San Antonio who had been a trail cook. The result was Lomax's first published collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), which he dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, a firm supporter of his efforts. The demands of supporting a family for a time curtailed Lomax's collecting.
In 1917, when Lomax was fired from his post at the University of Texas by Governor James E. Ferguson, Barrett Wendell, Jr. , brought him to Chicago as a bond salesman for the investment banking house of Lee, Higginson, and Company. Two years later he was called back to the University of Texas as secretary of the Ex-Students Association. In 1925 he reentered the financial world as head of the bond department of the Republic Bank in Dallas. Friends like the poet Carl Sandburg and the journalist Lloyd Lewis, whom he had met in Chicago, helped Lomax keep alive his interest in folklore even "amidst the deadening influence of the stock ticker. "
Beginning in 1911, when Kittredge secured a place for him on a convention program of the Modern Language Association of America, he was frequently engaged to lecture on cowboy songs at colleges and universities throughout the country. He was president of the American Folklore Society in 1912-1913. In 1919 he published a second collection, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp. Illness and the collapse of the bond market left Lomax out of work in 1932; but with a contract from the Macmillan Company for a book of American folk songs and support from the Library of Congress and the American Council of Learned Societies, he set out on the first of a series of collecting trips that were to occupy the rest of his life.
He now concentrated on recording the songs of the Southern black--blues, spirituals, and work chants. Often accompanied by his son Alan, he visited remote rural black communities, lumber camps, and especially penitentiaries, where blacks were isolated and where singing softened the pain of prison life. In the Arkansas Penitentiary he came upon two important songs, "Rock Island Line" and "John Henry, " the rhythmic ballad of a "steel drivin' man. " Being of a warm and friendly nature, Lomax moved effectively on every level of society. On the folk level, he encouraged many rural singers to take pride in, and develop, their musical traditions.
One of Lomax's discoveries was an influential figure: Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed "Lead Belly" because of his deep bass voice. Lomax and his son Alan found Lead Belly in a Louisiana penitentiary in 1933, arranged for his freedom, brought him to Greenwich Village in New York and published Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). On the scholarly level, Lomax has been criticized for his loose and eclectic treatment of some song texts and for inadequate documentation of the sources of his songs, not only in his published collections but even in his personal files. His strength was as a field collector and popularizer. As such, he had a profound impact on the widespread appreciation of the American folk song.
Lomax died at the age of eighty of a cerebral hemorrhage while visiting in Greenville, Mississippi, and was buried in Austin, Texas.
Achievements
Lomax was best known for collecting and preserving American folk songs. The quality and number of the songs he recorded for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song--more than 10, 000 in all. His "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" (1910) was considered the landmark in the study of American folklore. His two collections "American Ballads and Folk Songs" (1934) and "Our Singing Country" (1941) opened an entirely new area of American folk music to the public and were largely responsible for the folk song movement that developed in New York City and spread throughout the country.
Quotations:
"All my life I have been interested in the songs of the people--the intimate poetic and musical expression of unlettered people, from which group I am directly sprung. "
Connections
Lomax married Bess Baumann Brown of Austin, Texas, on June 9, 1904. They had four children: Shirley, John Avery, Alan, and Bess. His first wife died in 1931, and on July 21, 1934, he married Ruby Terrill, dean of women and associate professor of classical languages at the University of Texas.
