Sale!

Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings

Amazon.com Price:  $9.38 (as of 02/05/2019 16:30 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Alan Lomax’s prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist started with a go back and forth around the South and into the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country all through the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and in the back of the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music.

Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact within the understanding of American vernacular music, a few of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax all through their expedition around the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the most country’s most culturally dynamic regions.

Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained within the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived on the time of these recordings.

Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come.

Includes:

• Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana

• Side-by-side translations from French to English

• Photographs from the 1934 field go back and forth and biographical information about the performers


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Specialty Boutique » New, Used and Rental Textbooks » Humanities » Performing Arts » Music » Songbooks » Folk and Traditional » Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings

Recent Products