His conversations with Jelly Roll Morton, recorded in 1938 in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress, formed the basis for Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), a remarkable account closely following Morton’s narrative that is essential for anyone wishing to understand the history of jazz (and which has inspired two Broadway musicals). His experience interviewing Lead Belly encouraged Lomax to further explore the genre of oral biography. to put sound technology at the disposal of The Folk, to bring channels of communication to all sorts of artists and areas.” “The main point of my activity,” Lomax once remarked, “was. Lomax also built on the interest created by his books, records, and broadcasts with concert series such as The Midnight Special at Town Hall, which brought 1940s New Yorkers blues, flamenco, calypso, and Southern ballad singing, all still relatively unknown genres. American Folk Songs, Wellsprings of Music, and the prime-time series, Back Where I Come From, exposed national audiences to regional American music and such homegrown talents as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Josh White, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. In 1939, while doing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University, he produced the first of several radio series for CBS. The next year, Lomax was appointed Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folk Song. Their collecting resulted in several popular and influential anthologies of American folk songs, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1934) Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (New York: Macmillan, 1936), the first in depth biographical study of an American folk musician Our Singing Country (with Ruth Crawford Seeger) (New York: Macmillian, 1941) and Folk Song USA (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce 1947).Īfter completing a philosophy degree at the University of Texas in 1936, Lomax conducted field research in Haiti with his wife, Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold. In 1934, the two launched an effort to expand the holdings of recorded folk music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (established 1928), gathering thousands of field recordings of folk musicians throughout the American South, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast, as well as in Haiti and the Bahamas. He began his career in 1933 alongside his father, the pioneering folklorist John Avery Lomax, author of the best-selling Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). Austin, Texas, 1915) spent over six decades working to promote knowledge and appreciation of the world’s folk music. Song Collector imagines the story of this remarkable act of preservation from Sidney Robertson Cowell's perspective.Musicologist, writer, and producer Alan Lomax (b. Cowell sometimes referred to herself as a "song collector," and I began to wonder about the life of this song collector - about the sometimes lonely and frustrating process of "chasing songs" that Cowell describes in some of her correspondences. Yet the project felt incomplete without including the perspective of the documenter in addition to the documented, especially considering the extent to which Cowell's ambitions and ideals so deeply influenced her exhaustive ethnographic study. The first piece to grow out of my fascination with Cowell's work was Field Reports (2016), a chamber septet that weaves together re-imaginations of several folk songs from Cowell’s ambitious California Folk Song Project. These recordings present a remarkably rich depiction of Northern California at a pivotal time in American history. In 1938, Cowell secured a Works Projects Administration grant for the Northern California Folk Song Project, an undertaking that eventually produced two hundred acetate discs filled with thirty-five hours of field recordings in twelve different languages. Song Collector is the second in a cycle of large-scale compositions that engage with the work of the California ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |