Pioneer of the people's music
: "IT’S LIKE a scene from a Coen brothers movie: a Model A Ford pulls up outside a prison farm in a remote corner of Louisiana in the 1930s and out step two men, one middle-aged, one teenaged, and brush down their clothes, creased from weeks of travelling and camping out. The man is John Lomax, a Texan folklorist on a field trip to collect prison songs, and the boy is his son, Alan, who has taken time off from his studies at the University of Texas to help his dad. The back seat of the Ford has been torn out to make room for the pair’s recording equipment, which includes a newfangled disc-cutting recorder, vacuum-tube amplifier, blank aluminium discs, microphone, mixing board and all the accoutrements of a mobile studio.
The prison farm, known locally as Angola, after the African country from which many slaves were shipped, is bordered on three sides by the Mississippi, and most of its inmates are there for life. Armed with a letter of introduction from the Library of Congress, in Washington DC, the Lomaxes get permission from the warden to begin recording the prisoners’ folk songs – their interest is in secular songs rather than spirituals – and they set up their gear and go to work."
The prison farm, known locally as Angola, after the African country from which many slaves were shipped, is bordered on three sides by the Mississippi, and most of its inmates are there for life. Armed with a letter of introduction from the Library of Congress, in Washington DC, the Lomaxes get permission from the warden to begin recording the prisoners’ folk songs – their interest is in secular songs rather than spirituals – and they set up their gear and go to work."
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