Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 17,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings

A huge trea­sure trove of songs and inter­views record­ed by the leg­endary folk­lorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s have been dig­i­tized and made avail­able online for free lis­ten­ing. The Asso­ci­a­tion for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty, a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Lomax in the 1980s, has post­ed some 17,000 record­ings.

“For the first time,” Cul­tur­al Equi­ty Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Don Flem­ing told NPR’s Joel Rose, “every­thing that we’ve dig­i­tized of Alan’s field record­ing trips are online, on our Web site. It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, inter­views, music.”

It’s an amaz­ing resource. For a quick taste, here are a few exam­ples from one of the best-known areas of Lomax’s research, his record­ings of tra­di­tion­al African Amer­i­can cul­ture:

• “John Hen­ry” sung by pris­on­ers at the Mis­sis­sip­pi State Pen­i­ten­tiary, Parch­man Farm, in 1947.
• “Come Up Horsey,” a chil­dren’s lul­la­by sung in 1948 by Vera Hall, whose moth­er was a slave.
• “In a Shan­ty in Old Shan­ty Town” per­formed by Big Bill Broonzy, 1952.
• “Sto­ry of a slave who asked the dev­il to take his mas­ter,” told by Bessie Jones in 1961.

But that’s just scratch­ing the sur­face of what’s inside the enor­mous archive. Lomax’s work extend­ed far beyond the Deep South, into oth­er areas and cul­tures of Amer­i­ca, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. “He believed that all cul­tures should be looked at on an even play­ing field,” his daugh­ter Anna Lomax Wood told NPR. “Not that they’re all alike. But they should be giv­en the same dig­ni­ty, or they had the same dig­ni­ty and worth as any oth­er.”

You can lis­ten to Rose’s piece about the archive on the NPR web­site, as well as a 1990 inter­view with Lomax by Ter­ry Gross of Fresh Air, which includes sam­ple record­ings from Woody Guthrie, Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton, Lead Bel­ly and Mis­sis­sip­pi Fred McDow­ell. To dive into the Lomax audio archive, you can search the vast col­lec­tion by artist, date, genre, coun­try and oth­er cat­e­gories.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in March 2012.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

New, Inter­ac­tive Web Site Puts Online Thou­sands of Inter­na­tion­al Folk Songs Record­ed by the Great Folk­lorist Alan Lomax

Stream 35 Hours of Clas­sic Blues, Folk, & Blue­grass Record­ings from Smith­son­ian Folk­ways: 837 Tracks Fea­tur­ing Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie & More

Woody Guthrie Cre­ates a Doo­dle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1943): Beat Fas­cism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hop­ing Machine Run­ning