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Rare footage of New Orleans jazz bands shot by Alan Lomax
01.30.2015
10:37 am
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This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the inestimably important American folklorist/archivist/filmmaker/author/everything Alan Lomax. Unsurprisingly, there’s a plethora of commemorative events planned: a film marathon in Louisville, KY, a 13-hour radio marathon in Portland, a concert in London, England. And there will surely be some kind of boxed set of music. The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), an organization Lomax Founded at Hunter College in the 1980s, is the keeper of his legacy, and is the source to keep an eye on for announcements. It’s also a treasure trove of recorded media.

Lomax started out by accompanying his famous father, the musicologist and folklorist John Lomax, on field recording trips, documenting musicians in the American South, and went from there to an incredibly distinguished career in preserving and promoting small, obscure, important pockets of America’s cultural heritage. He helped build the Library of Congress’ song archive, and played a significant role in the promotion of American folk music, helping bring the likes of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, and Burl Ives to records, radio, and mass audiences. If you want the huge gaps in that bio filled in, there’s the ACE bio, and of course there are tons of books, written by Lomax, and written about him.
 

 
Since there’s just so much to his career that an omnibus post about Lomax would be an absurd undertaking, I thought it’d be a fun tribute to focus on a lesser known but still badass preservation project of his. In 1982, Lomax spent a lot of time in New Orleans with a video crew, recording that city’s famed jazz musicians, especially brass bands. There is some really hot stuff in here, including the world-famous Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and a lot these videos have criminally low view counts. Some of that footage was compiled for the DVD Jazz Parades: Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, which is viewable at no cost online here. He taped parades, funerals, indoor concerts, everywhere. So enjoy these documents of a 100% uniquely American music, and see if the Ernie K-Doe video doesn’t totally SLAY you. Captions are culled from the ACE web site.
 

 
Whole lotta Lomax after the jump!

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.30.2015
10:37 am
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You got the blues: Alan Lomax’s incredibly massive archive of American blues music is coming online
08.23.2013
11:08 am
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Alan Lomax blues recordings
 
As NPR’s show “The Record” reported last year, a massive collection of important American folk music recordings is now available on the Internet for anyone to enjoy:

Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It’s part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection—long before the age of the Internet.

Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. He worked from the 1930s to the ‘90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren’t quite sure how to tackle the problem.

“We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible,” says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the ‘80s. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.

“For the first time, everything that we’ve digitized of Alan’s field recording trips are online, on our website,” says Fleming. “It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music.”

Most of the archive consists of audio recordings, and they’ll keep any music ethnographer busy for quite some time. Starting in the late 1970s, however, Lomax incorporated video recordings into his researches, and they’re available too.

Below are two remarkable videos from the collection.

Dennis McGee, “Vous M’avez Donne Vôtre Parole (You Gave Me Your Word),” (Eunice, Louisiana, 1983):

 
Belton Sutherland, improvised blues (Canton, Mississippi, September 3, 1978):

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Amazing footage of blues legend Son House
The only film footage of blues/folk legend Leadbelly
A nitty gritty and poetic documentary on the Mississippi blues

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.23.2013
11:08 am
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R.L. Burnside’s First Film Appearance : See My Jumper Hanging On the Line (1978)

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The magnificent R. L. Burnside in his first film appearance, performing See My Jumper Hanging On The Line. Filmed by Alan Lomax at Burnside’s home in Independence, Mississippi, August, 1978.

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.28.2010
11:04 pm
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