New World Gems from the Alan Lomax Collection
By Steve Winick
Rounder Records' Alan Lomax Collection grows and grows, with albums covering music from both Europe and the Americas being released monthly. This time I'll look at some of Lomax's new world recordings; next time, we'll look at some of his European projects.
Black Appalachia [Rounder 11661-1823 (1999)], a collection of 1930s and 1940s field recordings that Lomax compiled but never released in the 1970s, can be faulted for only one thing: geographical vagueness. As Stephen Wade points out in his introduction, the performances here were recorded not only in the heart of the Appalachians of Tennessee and Virginia, but also in the hilly regions of Mississippi, on the streets of Nashville and Little Rock, and even in New York City and Washington, D.C. Wade calls this "an intuitive, poetic logic," but I don't think it's logic at all. It's rather Lomax's attempt to express his convictions about the importance and vitality of the full range of black Southern music — a project that also involves the disc Black Texicans [Rounder 11661-1821 (1999)]. Taken together, the two discs offer a lot of insight into secular black music in the southern U.S., arguably the most influential popular music ever. What Black Appalachia does best is chronicle the range of music — from square dance jigs and reels to gritty blues, from improvised washboard trap kits to intricate banjo solos, and from field shouts and hollers to shockingly forthright sexual songs — performed by black southerners in the 1930s and 1940s. There are tracks on which you'd never guess the performers are black. The sleeve notes make much of this, and it's good to be reminded that the banjo's origins lie in Africa, and that old-time string band music had both white and black performers. The rest of the CD is very much like the material recorded on Lomax's Southern Journey series. Indeed his star performers, Sid Hemphill and Lucius Smith, play on a good many tracks of both, contributing mainly banjo, fiddle and vocals, but also quill panpipes and drums. For work songs, the Lomaxes visited penitentiaries and prison farms and found the men who still sang rhythmic chants to coordinate heavy labor. Three such recordings are on Black Appalachia. Probably the most polished performers are Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, who contribute three tracks of blistering blues to finish off the CD. These three tracks seem somehow tacked onto the rest of the album, but maybe it's just the poetic logic again. No matter, they're marvelous recordings, as are all the ones on this excellent production.
There are two more recordings discussed in this article. To read the entire article, see Dirty Linen #86 or subscribe.
