Source Recordings
The archival recordings that this album is built around come, overwhelmingly, from the work that was begun in 1928 under the supervision of The Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Culture. The tireless work of documenting American regional folk music and art by collectors like John & Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Herbert Halpert & many others has left us an irreplaceable treasury of songs, field hollers, stories, sermons, photographs, correspondence, field notes, & film footage that would be impossible to replicate today.
They felt an urgency to document these ‘oral’ traditions because they sensed that these arts were being lost in the rush of progress, & they worked to capture them in their purest form. They valued the ‘context’ of these recordings, & often preferred to record these artists not in professional recording studios, but in their familiar surroundings, often capturing the natural sound of the environment as well. They felt that this added to the ‘3-dimensional’ quality of the recordings.
This album is built on that foundation — on the incredibly rich heritage that has been left to us by the talented artists & field documentarians working throughout the first half of the 20th Century.
