Alan Lomax’s Southern Journeys
By Richard Gehr, eMusic Contributor
At the height of the Great Depression, folklorist John Lomax and his 18-year-old son, Alan Lomax, spent the summer of 1933 driving through the South together, recording ballads, blues, shape-singers, chanteys, hillbilly instrumentals and prison work songs on a wind-up Ediphone cylinder recorder. They fought fevers and argued politics along the way (Alan was a life-long lefty), ending up in Washington D.C., where they donated hundreds of cylinders to the Library of Congress's Archive of… more »
