CD Review

Alan Lomax Collection
(Rounder)

Rounder Records has undertaken one of the most daunting projects in modern folk music history: the release of John & Alan Lomax's complete field recordings on an unprecedented 106-CD collection. Visionary ethnomusicologist John Lomax is famous for his pioneering research missions through the Appalachia and the South. But Lomax's expeditions, especially those made with his son Alan, extended around the world. This promises to be the most important collection of authentic folk and traditional music ever published, a must have for libraries and serious students of traditional songs and the oral tradition. Its value is impossible to overstate. The collection, edited by Alan, is being released in sets, each available by subscription (with a discount). It's so vast, and the time frame of its release is so long, that it's hard to get a good handle on it.

I received 6 discs from the first 13-CD set, Southern Journey, in 1997 during the final days of Fast Folk and never had a chance to review them there. This collection is broken down thematically into genres including spirituals, traditional ballads, blues, workgang songs, and dance music. This is more than a goldmine for scholars and collectors - it is nothing less than the spirit of a period and place that are gone forever, re-created through its music and its voices. At its most ghostly, you can hear old blues singer Fred McDowell singing "I Wish I Were In Heaven Sitting Down." The song's two lines are too much for the weary singer to get out, and he mumbles more and more of the lyric until, by the end, he fades away completely and the voice of the solitary guitar, like a disembodied spirit, finishes alone. -HB

In the past few months, I've received three discs from the Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales series. The first CD, Songs of Seduction, a collection of thirty-three tracks, is billed as "A ribald collection of love songs, ballads, and melodies recorded at pubs, firesides and campfires," but fortunately, love has nothing to do with most of these ditties. These are songs about lust, rutting, deception, flirtation, getting knocked up, and other nuts and bolts of raw sex. The best tracks are the pub performances that include audience participation, capturing the social aspect of these songs. The overall impression one gets is of the sustained humor with which sex is handled in these songs and performances. Listening to this legacy of folk wit and wisdom on the body and libido, it's hard to see why Masters & Johnson or the Hites were ever considered shocking at all....

More recently, I received a pair of CDs called Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland: Storytelling Ballads as Included in Francis James Child's English & Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898). The first volume selects representative ballads from Child #2-106 and the second from #105-299. In the first collection you'll find "Strawberry Lane" (a version of the Elfin Knight, which is related to "Scarborough Fair"), "The Twa Sisters" (sororicide), "Lord Randal" (model for Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall"), "The Cruel Mother" (double infanticide and denial hundreds of years before Susan Smith), "The Famous Flower of Serving Men," and of course "Barbara Allen." The second collection includes "The Baffled Knight" (a cleverly thwarted rape), "Mary Hamilton," "The Gypsie Laddie," "The Laird o' Drum" and "The Golden Victory" (Golden Vanity). Each CD comes with an entire booklet with complete lyrics (some of the recordings don't include all the verses Child collected).

The recordings, made between 1949 and 1968, capture performances by well-known traditional singers like Jeannie Robertson and Harry Cox as well as other lesser known keepers of the traditional song hoard. The recordings have that undescribable field recording quality which somehow feels less like live performance than life period. In these tracks, these venerable ballads shake off the heavy weight of their academic past and their folk-revival commercialism and return to the hearth of the people who have sustained and been sustained by them. It's like hearing them for the first time.

The Lomax Collection currently includes:

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler - a sampling of the various kinds of recordings in the series.
Southern Journey Series - 13 CDs
Caribbean Voyage
Classic Louisiana Recordings
Portrait Series
Prison Songs
Christmas Songs
World Library of Folk and Primitive Music
Deep River of Song
Italian Treasury
Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales