Wave The Ocean, Wave The Sea
Field recordings from Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey 1959 - 1960
Volume 1: “Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea.”
Side A.
1. Wade Ward: Chilly Winds
2. Texas Gladden, Hobart Smith, and Preston Smith: Lonely Tombs
3. Ed Young, Lonnie Young, and G.D. Young: Church, I Know We Got Another Building*
4. United Sacred Harp Convention: Sherburne (#186)
5. Bessie Jones & group: Reg’lar, Reg’lar, Rolling Under
6. Floyd Batts & prisoners: Dollar Mamie*
7. George Fields: Bob Johnson’s Tune*
8. Silver Leaf Quartet: Dark Day
9. Texas Gladden: Whole Heap Of Little Horses
Side B.
1. Forrest City Joe & His Three Aces: Drink On Little Girl†
2. Johnny Lee Moore & prisoners: Early In the Morning
3. Ollie Gilbert: Pretty Polly Oliver
4. Neal Morris & Charlie Everidge: Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea
5. Fred McDowell & Fanny Davis: Gravel Road Blues
6. Vera Ward Hall: Riding In A Buggy*
7. Daddy Cool on WEUP Huntsville*
*Previously unissued. †Previously unissued version.
SIDE ONE
A1.
Chilly Winds. Wade Ward, banjo.
Galax, Virginia. August 31, 1959.
Uncle Wade Ward (1892-1971) was the scion of a musical family whose roots in Southwestern Virginia went back generations.
He learned to pick the banjo at eleven and play the fiddle at sixteen; by the time he was eighteen he and his older brother Davy Crockett Ward were playing as a duo popular at dances, houseraisings, and other social functions around their home in Independence, Virginia. Wade had recorded commercially, both solo and with his Buck Mountain Band, for the OKeh label in the 1920s. Alan Lomax’s father, John A. Lomax, recorded him in 1937 with Crockett’s string band, the Bogtrotters, and solo on fiddle and banjo, before Alan and Pete Seeger met him at the 1939 Galax Fiddler’s Convention. Another session in 1941 brought the total number of Library of Congress records featuring Ward to nearly two hundred-one of which was a version of “Chilly Winds.” Alan wanted to feature his virtuosic banjo playing in Southern Folk Heritage Series, and went knocking on Uncle Wade’s door again in 1959. Lomax wrote of him:
“He had a good few drinks in his time and played a few dances, and all of this mellowed him till he became as kindly and
gentle as the green hills among which he spent his life. When he plays, you realize that the real secret of musicianship lies, not in the number of notes per second or in difficult passages mastered, or in surprises or in great ideas, but in the message that
each note carries.”
Wade Ward listening to playback, with Alan Lomax. Galax, Virginia.
A2.
Lonely Tombs.
Texas Gladden, vocal; Hobart Smith,
vocal and guitar; Preston Smith, vocal. Bluefield, Virginia. August 24, 1959.
Over a dozen years had passed since Alan Lomax had last seen the talented multi-instrumentalist Hobart Smith and his
gifted ballad-singing sister, Texas Gladden. In 1946, the siblings had left their homes in Southwest Virginia’s Blue Ridge
for a trip to New York, a concert with Jean Ritchie at Columbia University, and a session at Decca Studios, where Lomax
was then serving as a producer of an American folkmusic album series. Alan’s first stop in 1959 was to visit the Smith family, although he found that failing health had somewhat constricted the abilities Texas had demonstrated in ‘46 and earlier, in 1941, when he first recorded her.(Lomax returned in 1942 to record
Hobart, as Texas had told him that “I’ve got a brother
who can play anything.”) Hobart Smith, on the other
hand, was as spry as ever - on guitar, fiddle, banjo,
even piano. Preston Smith was Hobart and Texas’s
brother and a Pentecostal Holiness preacher; he joined
them for this nineteenth century Baptist hymn they had
learned from their mother. By 1959, it had become a
country gospel standard recorded by the likes of Wade
Mainer, the Stanley Brothers, and Hank Williams.
A3.
Church, I Know We Got Another Building
(Not Made With Hands).
Ed Young, fife; Lonnie Young, Sr., bass drum;
G.D. Young, snare drum.
Como, Mississippi. September 21, 1959.
In 1942, during a joint research project of the Library
of Congress and Nashville’s Fisk University,
Alan Lomax made the first-ever recordings of the fife and
drum music of the Mississippi Hill Country, east of
the Delta. “Finding this music still alive,” he later
wrote, “was the greatest surprise of my of all my collecting
trips in America.” Played now exclusively for
entertainment at country picnics and dances, its roots
stretch to before the Revolutionary War, when black
fife and drum corps accompanied local militias
--one of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves is said to have
Texas Gladden. Salem, Virginia
played in such a corps. Their music is
considered to be one of the oldest extant forms
of African music in North America.
Lomax recalled in 1993: “Watching the Young
brothers’ line of fife and drums sashay across
the yard, enclosed by their dancing family, I
saw in my mind’s eye the jazz parades of New
Orleans.... I remembered the Mardi Gras parades
in Trinidad and Rio and the wild rara parades
of Haiti and the films I’d seen of African processionals,
and I could see that this family
party in northern Mississippi belonged to that
African tradition.” Sacred pieces have seldom
been recorded by fife and drum ensembles; this
one is widespread in the black congregational
repertoire. The Young brothers’ band was later
christened the Southern Fife and Drum Corps
and appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and a
Friends of Old-Time Music concert in the 1960s.
Ed Young. Williamsburg, Virginia.
A4.
Sherburne (#186).
United Sacred Harp Convention.
Led by A.A. Blocker.
Old Corinth Church, Fyffe, Alabama, September 12,
1959.
The recordings made at the 1959 United Sacred Harp
Convention in Fyffe, Alabama, were the first made of
four-part “fa-so-la” singing in stereo. Lomax had,
as he later wrote, “tried and failed, as had many
others, to record this music monaurally” at
The Sacred Harp Singing Society of Birmingham,
Alabama, in 1942, and he hoped to “finally do
justice to [its] haunting beauty.” Over the course
of the two-day convention nearly two hundred
songs,memorial lessons, and prayers passed over
the heads of his Ampex recorder, with Alan’s
notations filling the margins of his notebook:
“stately,” “militant,” “lively,” “marvelous,”
“fascinating performance,” “exciting sound,”
“wonderful sound.” This Christmas carol - the text
of which was composed in Britain around 1700, and
where it is sung as the sprightly “While Shepherds
Watched”--becomes the fugueing tune “Sherburne” on
page 186 of The Sacred Harp. “Noble and vigorous,”
Lomax wrote of it. “One of the best recordings.”
The United Sacred Harp Musical Association commemorated
the fiftieth anniversary of Lomax’s historic
recordings by returning to Old Corinth Church for
their annual convention in September, 2009.
A5.
Reg’lar, Reg’lar Rolling Under.
Bessie Jones, lead vocal, with Nat Rahmings, drum;
Hobart Smith, banjo; Ed Young, fife; and John Davis,
Henry Morrison, Albert Ramsay, and Emma Ramsay,
vocals.
Williamsburg, Virginia. April 28, 1959.
Lomax’s “Southern Journey” field recording trip
ended in October of 1959, but by April of the next
year Alan was back recording in the South, this
time in the capacity of music supervisor to the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s film, “Music of
Williamsburg”. The aim was to recreate the sound
of African American music as it might have been
Georgia Sea Island Singers, including John Davis (center,
rear), Bessie Jones (in blue with hat), and Mable
Hillery (far right). Williamsburg, Virginia.
heard in Colonial Williamsburg, and, according to
a strikingly progressive 1962 press release from
the Foundation, “to portray the important contributions
of the Negro race to the nation’s heritage.”
Lomax assembled a novel cast, comprised of
many musicians he’d recorded several months earlier,
and drawn from disparate locales. Ed Young
came north from Como, Mississippi, to provide
the necessary fife-blowing. Hobart Smith traveled
east from Saltville, Virginia, in the Blue
Ridge Mountains, with his four-string banjo and
a clawhammer technique learned, in part, from an
African American. Nat Rahmings, a Bahamian drummer
and drum-maker, was brought in from Miami.
And the Georgia Sea Island Singers were the vocal
group at the ensemble’s core. After filming was
completed, Lomax wrote, the “musicians stayed on
for what turned out to be a day of extraordinary
music-making and musical cross-fertilization.”
Alan had turned up this tune years before, having
gone looking for the oldest published black
dance songs in Virginia - its references to the
drinking gourd evince its slavery-time origin -
and he taught it to the group. “I cannot swear to
the authenticity of this reconstructed material,”
Lomax continued. “But the musically conservative
Sea Island singers gave it their enthusiastic
approval.” The Foundation approved of it too,
and featured it in the film.
A6.
Dollar Mamie.
Floyd Batts and prisoners, vocals and axes.
Camp 11, Parchman Farm (Mississippi State
Penitentiary), Parchman, Mississippi.
September 16, 1959.
Alan Lomax first experienced the group work songs of
Southern black prisoners in 1933, when he was
seventeen years old. He and his father John A. Lomax
visited penitentiaries that year in Texas,
Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi, making the
first audio recordings of a music remarkable for
its intensity, creativity, and nobility in spite
of the brutal conditions in which it was spawned.
The Lomaxes were initially interested in the remote,
insulated prison farms as potential repositories
of antebellum black song; as Alan Lomax,
Bruce Jackson, and others have noted, they were for
all intents and purposes twentieth-century replicas
of the slave plantation, with unpaid black laborers
working under the whip and the gun. But what
the Lomaxes found there was nothing less than a new
music. The work songs adapted the field holler - the
free-metered, unaccompanied solo song of protest
and complaint that sired the blues - into manyvoiced
chants propelled by the rhythmic striking
of axes and hoes, and whose purpose was, as Jackson
has put it, “making it in Hell.”
The Lomaxes returned to Angola (Louisiana)
and Parchman Farm in 1934 for further recordings,
and Alan made three more trips to Parchman alone
in 1947, 1948, and 1959. “In the pen itself,” Lomax
wrote in 1957, “we saw that the songs, quite
literally, kept the men alive and normal.” They
Floyd Batts, Mississippi
State Penitentiary
(Parchman Farm).
came “out of the filthy darkness of the pen,
touched with exquisite musicality... a testimony
to the love of truth and beauty which is
a universal human trait.”
But when he made his last visit in 1959,
Shirley Collins remembers, Alan found that
“the music had lost something of its
grandeur and despair. It may have been that
conditions, although still harsh, were not as
brutal as they had been, or perhaps it was
that the younger prisoners didn’t want to keep
up the old way of singing and the old songs.”
This performance - featuring the characters of
Dollar Mamie and Dollar Bob, and recorded in
some form by the Lomaxes at every one of their
Parchman sessions - might have struck Alan
this way, what with its laughter and falsetto
asides. But as a prisoner from Texas’s Ramsey
State Farm told Bruce Jackson: “Sometimes a guy
be burdened down and he don’t want to pass his
burden on to nobody. That’s because he don’t want
nobody feeling sorry for him or thinking he’s
feeling sorry for hisself. So he do it in a song,
and he’d make it real sad. ... Well, he’s thinking
about his family and doesn’t want the other
people to know it so he makes it into a joke
song, a work song.” When Jackson made his last
recordings in the Texas prison farm system in
1966, the mechanization of prison agriculture was
pushing the work songs into obsolescence. By the
early 1970s, they had become extinct.
A7.
Bob Johnson’s Tune.
George Fields, fiddle.
Lexington, Alabama. September 8 or 9, 1959.
George Fields, seventy-four years old at the time
of this recording, had lived in Lexington all his
life, and had been a fiddler for nearly all of it.
He played for many years at dances, which is why
“I play too fast,” as he self-depreciatingly told
Lomax when he asked Fields about his style.
“They all jump up and down fast, you see.”
George learned this tune, locally just called
“Bob,” from Bob Johnson himself, a merchant and
musician of some repute around Lauderdale County.
“Uncle Bob’s gettin’ mighty old now,” Fields’
friend Lonnie Odum remarked after the performance.
“He’s gone away!” George replied. “He’s
gone to Abraham!”
A8.
Dark Day.
Silver Leaf Quartet: Cephus Brown, lead vocal;
Cordelia Harris, Ellis McPherson, Melvin Smith,
vocals.
Ark, Virginia. April 4, 1960.
Founded around 1920, the Silver Leaf Quartet(te)
of Norfolk was one of the most popular and
respected vocal groups of their era, making a
number of influential and brisk-selling
records for the OKeh label from 1928 to 1931.
They toured the Deep South and Eastern Seaboard
extensively in the 1930s; their 1930 engagement
at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Baptist Church sold
out for 21 straight days. When Lomax met them in
1959, two of the original Quartet members -
Ellis McPherson and Melvin Smith - were still
with the group, which continued to perform on
the radio and in churches throughout the Hampton
Roads area. Their leader at the time, sixtyseven
year old Cephus Brown, remembered this
spiritual from his childhood being led by a
local deacon and renowned singer named John
Scott. Cordelia Harris, Scott’s niece, believed
it was his composition. The Quartet continued
to perform, although increasingly rarely, until
1979.
A9.
Whole Heap of Little Horses.
Texas Gladden, vocal.
Salem, Virginia. August 26, 1959.
Alan Lomax considered Texas Gladden one of the
three best ballad singers he ever recorded (the
others being Almeda Riddle of Arkansas and Scotland’s
Jeannie Robertson). He wasn’t alone in
admiring her - several folklorists had
collected her songs in the 1930s, and, two years
after hearing her sing at the White Top
Festival in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt invited
Texas and her brother Hobart Smith to perform at
the White House. Although her singing had been
diminished by ill-health, she recorded a
number of shorter pieces for Lomax in 1959 -
love songs, some ballad verses, and lullabies
sung to her granddaughter Cynthia Tuttle, whom
Texas addresses here as “Baby Cindy.” Despite her
popularity, she was never much inclined to travel
for the concerts folk revivalists were putting on
in the mid-’60s. Besides, when Lomax wondered why
she’d never made much “professional use” of her
singing, she replied that she’d “been too busy
raising babies! When you bring up nine, you have
your hands full. All I could sing was lullabies.”
Texas died in 1967.
Forrest City Joe, with guitar, and
friends. Hughes, Arkansas.
SIDE TWO
B1.
Drink On, Little Girl.
Forrest City Joe & His Three Aces.
Hughes, Arkansas. October 1, 1959.
In his “The Land Where the Blues Began” (1993),
Alan Lomax told about meeting Forrest City Joe
(Joe B. Pugh) one September afternoon in Hughes,
a small town in Arkansas cotton country, about
eighty miles south of Memphis: “Joe was sitting
on the front gallery of a tavern, identified in
the shaky lettering of a sign, ‘The Old Whiskey
Store.’ He was playing the guitar for a group of
loungers. I listened a while, bought him a drink,
and we agreed to round up musicians for a recording
session that evening. Joe was quick, energetic,
ambitious, and fast-talking. As we drove out
into the country to find his musical buddies, he
pulled out his harmonica and began to blow in the
screaming, far-out style that my old friend Sonny
Boy Williamson made popular.... When he finished,
he knocked the spit out of the instrument and
said, ‘This thing gonna buy me a car like yours
sometime.’
“By nine o’clock that evening Pugh had rounded
up his band, Boy Blue and His Two (when backing
him they became Forrest City Joe’s Three Aces),
and Lomax had set up his recording machine on the
bar at Charley Houlin’s juke joint. Alan continued:
“No New York technician would have approved
of the acoustics. Between takes, the place was
a bedlam, but the emotional atmosphere was mellow
and marvelous.... Boy Blue and his group kept
topping Joe, but Joe kept carving his rivals as
number succeeded number. He grew steadily more
controlled and more professional as he listened
to his playbacks. By the end of the evening he
was cock of the walk. Not only that, I could see
that he was half-way toward becoming a professional,
able to leave Hughes and face the big
world.
“At three-thirty A.M. I could scarcely see the
typewriter to type out the contracts with these
young eager beavers of the Arkansas blues. At
four, I loaded the machine into the car. The
youngsters went off to get two hours sleep before
their cotton picking day began. Joe wanted another
drink and deserved one.”
Lomax, needless to say, was immensely taken with
Forrest City Joe, and when he returned to New
York in late October, he found that “everyone in
the recording business who had heard [Joe’s] records
agreed that he had a chance to make it, to
own that Buick.” Pugh, for his part, was eager
for news, and wrote to Alan in early December:
“I hope the records are going over good.... I’ve
had the blues ever since you left--I can hardly
help myself--wondering how you liked the songs.”
But in April of 1960, after Lomax had included
several of Forrest City Joe’s songs in
the forthcoming Southern Folk Heritage Series,
a letter arrived from Joe’s manager, Lemuel
Ramsey: “Joe B. Pugh - Forrest City Joe and His
Three Aces - wanted me to write to you and thank
you for the check for recordings - so I am
taking the opportunity to do so - but Joe is not
here to tell me what to write. Joe B. Pugh was
killed in a car wreck Sunday morning about seven
April 3rd. They had been out all night playing
at Negro tonks and juke joints - as customary on
Saturday nights. They were returning to Hughes
from Bruins when the driver - Robert Williams
- lost control of the car and it flipped over
throwing all five out - knocked Joe’s brains out
on the highway - killing him instantly. If I can
be of further assistance in the above matter,
please let me know”.
B2.
Early In the Morning.
Johnny Lee Moore and prisoners, vocals and hoes.
Camp B, Parchman Farm (Mississippi State
Penitentiary), Parchman, Mississippi.
September 19 or 20, 1959.
It’s futile to give titles to prison work-songs.
With every performance they were created anew,
the leader drawing on the vast cache of floating
verses at his disposal and often intermingling
the lines that sprang to mind with stanzas of his
own devising. This performance, led by Johnny Lee
Moore, of Greenville, Mississippi, mentions the
oft-encountered female figures of Roberta (‘Berta)
and Mamie (see A6), and includes some of the more
strident lines to be found in the prison-song
repertoire. They were aimed at the armed white
guard, mounted nearby on horseback: “Captain,
don’t you know me / Don’t you know my name / I
used to the be porter on the Southbound train ...
I’m the same grand rascal stole your watch and
chain.” Lomax recorded a similar work-song called
“Early In the Morning” in 1948 at Parchman, led
by a prisoner named Benny Will Richardson, nicknamed
“22.”
B3.
Pretty Polly Oliver.
Ollie Gilbert, vocal.
Mountain View, Arkansas. October 6, 1959.
Aunt Ollie Gilbert, born in 1892 in Hickory
Grove, Arkansas, was sixty-seven when Lomax and
Collins visited her and her husband Oscar (“the
fightingest man in the county”) at home in Mountain
View, Stone County. Jimmy Driftwood, de
facto folk-music ambassador of the area,
introduced them, calling Ollie “a walking storehouse
of early American folk songs.” This ballad,
originally published as a British broadside entitled
“Polly Oliver’s Rambles” in 1823, is not
to be confused with the murder ballad of “Pretty
Polly”; its theme is the recurrent one of young
girls dressing as men to follow their lovers into
war. Aunt Ollie’s is the only extant version that
places the action in the Revolutionary War, with
Polly declaring herself “a United States soldier;
from George Washington I came,” before she hops
into bed with the captain. Shirley Collins
remembers Gilbert as having a large repertoire of
bawdy material - ”ugly songs,” Ollie called them
- but she only sang them to Shirley in the
privacy of the outhouse, so recording any of
them was unfortunately out of the question.
B4.
Wave the Ocean.
Neal Morris, vocal; Charlie Everidge, mouth-bow.
Mountain View, Arkansas. October 6, 1959.
Neal Morris was Jimmy Driftwood’s father and a
font of Ozark Mountain ballads, comic songs, and
stories. He also knew how to call a dance, which
he proves here while Charlie Everidge provides
accompaniment on the mouth-bow or picking bow.
Everidge, eighty-four years old at the time and
one-sixteenth Choctaw, recalled the instrument
being frequently used for front-porch dances in
the teens and twenties. He also claimed to invent
it, although Lomax noted that a similar instrument
appears in a cave painting in Southern
France dating from 15,000 B.C. Charlie and Neal,
though long-time neighbors in Timbo, Arkansas,
had never played together before, and because
Charlie refused to pay the $5 deposit for electricity
service, they were recorded in Lomax and
Collins’ motel room in nearby Mountain View.
Neal Morris, Timbo, Arkansas.
B5.
I’m Going Down That Gravel.
Fred McDowell, vocal and guitar;
Fanny Davis, comb; Miles Pratcher, guitar.
Como, Mississippi. September 22, 1959.
Fred McDowell was a farmer who emerged from the
woods on the first day of fall, 1959, and ambled
over to his neighbor Lonnie Young’s front porch
in his overalls with a guitar in hand. Lomax had
no idea what he was in for, but after McDowell’s
first song he knew he was in the presence of one
of the most original, talented, and affecting
country bluesmen ever recorded. After McDowell
recorded several of his solo blues, accompanying
himself on guitar and bottleneck slide, he
was joined by his neighbor Miles Pratcher on second
guitar and his sister Fanny Davis on “kazoo.”
Lomax recalled Davis “singing along through a
comb, her man’s felt hat falling over one eye,
her plaits sticking out every which way, her legs
wide apart, leaning her big body in toward Fred
and mixing her notes with his.” Davis was also
a singer at the Hunter’s Chapel in Como, and in
1966 she provided the lead vocal on Fred’s first
recorded version of “You Got to Move,” which the
Rolling Stones later made, for better or worse,
into his signature song. “I’m Going Down That
Gravel” borrows some of its tune and its first two
verses from Sleepy John Estes’ “The Girl I Love,
She Got Long Curly Hair” (1929), replacing Estes’
“I’m going to Brownsville” with “I’m going down
that gravel.” This recording has previously been
issued under the erroneous titles of “Going Down
to the Races” and “Going Down the River.”
Fred McDowell. Como, Mississippi.
B6.
Riding In A Buggy / Candy Gal.
Vera Ward Hall, vocal.
Livingston, Alabama. October 10, 1959.
Adele “Vera” Ward Hall (1902-1964), who worked
all of her life as a washerwoman, nursemaid,
and cook, was regarded by the Lomaxes as one of
America’s greatest singers. She first came to the
attention of John A. Lomax in 1937, when Ruby
Pickens Tartt, folklorist and chair of the
Federal Writers’ Project of Sumter County,
Alabama, introduced them. Lomax recorded Hall
during three separate sessions in 1937, 1939,
and 1940, writing that she had “the loveliest
voice I have ever recorded.” She sang Baptist
hymns with her cousin Dock Reed and other
Livingston friends, but she was also willing to
record blues, ballads, and “worldly songs” such
as “Stagolee,” “John Henry,” and “Boll Weevil,”
learned from her friend Rich Amerson, and forbidden
by her family. Alan Lomax met Hall in
1948, when he arranged for her and Reed to come
New York City for an American Music Festival.
Their time together resulted in six-and-a-half
hours of recordings and the raw material for
her oral biography, which Lomax published in
“The Rainbow Sign” (1959). In that book, Vera is
called “Nora” to protect her identity and honor
her confidences. Making his first trip to Vera’s
home in Livingston, Alan found her voice and her
eagerness to sing undiminished. Simple as they
are, these brief ring-play verses nonetheless
exemplify the delicacy and pathos of her ability.
Five years later, Lomax wrote in her
obituary in “Sing Out!”: “The sound comes from
deep within her when she sings, from a source of
gold and light, otherwise hidden, and falls directly
upon your ear like sunlight.... It is from
singers like Vera Hall that all of us who love
folk music in America have everything to learn.
Her performances were all graced with dignity and
love.”
B7.
DJ Daddy Cool on WEUP Huntsville.
In transit between Scottsboro and Huntsville,
Alabama.
September 12, 1959.
Lomax captured this fascinating piece of what is
now radio nostalgia while he was driving, onto a
machine called a Midgetape. This forerunner of
the Dictaphone was promoted by the Mohawk Business
Machines Company as “the World’s First Battery-
Operated Pocket Tape Recorder.” WEUP (1600
AM) had been launched in March of 1958 in
Huntsville and was Alabama’s first black-owned and
operated radio station, broadcasting gospel, R&B,
live sermons, and hourly news bulletins compiled
and edited in-house (as heard here). The station
is still independently owned, and broadcasts on
both 1600 AM and 103.1 FM as “The Most Hip Hop
and R&B,” as well as gospel music on 1700 AM -
”Huntsville’s Heritage Station.” Efforts made to
identify and locate DJ Daddy Cool have been
unsuccessful.
The Southern Journey 50th Anniversary Series
is a co-production by:
The Association for Cultural Equity
www.culturalequity.org
&
Mississippi Records
4007 N. Mississippi
Portland, OR 97227
All recordings made by Alan Lomax on an Ampex 602-2,
“Suitcase Model” tape machine. Assisted by Shirley Collins
(1959) and Anna Lomax (1960). Photo of Alan Lomax and Wade
Ward by Shirley Collins. All others by Alan Lomax.
Compiled and annotated by Nathan Salsburg in commemoration
of the fiftieth anniversary of the “Southern Journey.”
Acknowledgment is due to those who have previously written
about these musicians, their recordings and Lomax’s
“Southern Journey” field trip: Alan Lomax, Anna Lomax Wood,
Matthew Barton, John Cohen, Ron Cohen, Shirley Collins,
John Cowley, David Evans, Andrew Kaye, and John Szwed.
Thanks also to Don Fleming, Todd Harvey, Bob Moses,
Howard Wuelfing, and Bert Lyons.
Also available as an LP through Mississippi Records
(c)(p)2010 Odyssey Productions,Inc. Courtesy of the Alan
Lomax Archive. All Rights Reserved.