A digital musical museum.

AuthorWalker, Jesse
PositionAlan Lomax folk music collection online - Briefly Noted - Brief article

Starting in the 1930s, Alan Lomax roamed the world recording folk music of all kinds, from Mississippi prison songs to Uzbek ballads, plus sermons, stories, children's games, ambient noise, and other audio artifacts of human life. In one of my favorite Lomax tapes, the Arkansas singer Neal Morris passes along some local lore about the song "Jesse James." The lyrics have it all wrong, he says: The Ford boys shot someone else and then collected the reward anyway, letting James secretly survive into the 20th century.

Lomax was a controversial figure. One side of the...

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