Alan Lomax Recording Locations

Subject: Alan Lomax Recording Locations
From: GUEST,Peter J. GOssett
Date: 03 Jul 19 - 12:31 PM

Does anyone know where to find a list of locations Alan Lomax recorded? Specifically, I'm curious to know if he ever recorded in Winston County, Alabama.

Subject: RE: Alan Lomax Recording Locations
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 03 Jul 19 - 12:48 PM

The Roud index lists 221 entries for Alan Lomax in Alabama. Winston doesn't appear as a place-name, but you may need to go through the entries to look for place names that may be in the county.

Mick

Subject: RE: Alan Lomax Recording Locations
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Jul 19 - 01:06 PM

Hi, Peter -
You'll also want to look at the Alan Lomax Archive. There's a "locations" link on the first page that will give you a good start. but one you get into it, you may never come up for air.
http://research.culturalequity.org/home-audio.jsp

Subject: RE: Alan Lomax Recording Locations
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Jul 19 - 02:34 PM

Thanks for the replies. It's been helpful!

Subject: RE: Alan Lomax Recording Locations
From: GeoffLawes
Date: 10 Jul 19 - 05:32 PM

This link should give locations, I think
http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=recording&id=US&idType=countryCode&sortBy=abc

Subject: RE: Alan Lomax Recording Locations
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Jun 26 - 09:11 PM

Smithsonian Magazine published Alan Lomax Spent Years Traveling the Country to Record the Sounds of America. The Legacy of His Obsession Will Live Forever in the Summer 2026 issue, by Chris Heath.

By letting Muddy Waters hear himself for the first time, he unlocked a new confidence that set the sharecropper on the path to superstardom. And that’s just the start of what he found in churches, prisons and even lumberjack camps

1. Mississippi: A Prequel

On a small, grass-covered plot next to a quiet country road a few miles northwest of Clarksdale, Mississippi, stands a plaque identifying “Muddy Waters’s House.” The blues pioneer “lived most of his first thirty years at a house on this site,” it proclaims. The third sentence (of four in total) further notes: “Muddy Waters was first recorded here in 1941 by Alan Lomax, who was compiling songs for the Library of Congress.”

That was the kind of thing Alan Lomax did. In August 1941, Lomax was traveling across northern Mississippi with some companions, busy doing the work that would make him the 20th century’s most famous musical folklorist—searching out and capturing for posterity the rich, wild, undiscovered diversity of expression through music and song to be found across this country. When his inquiries brought him to this house on the primarily cotton-­growing Stovall Plantation, the house’s 28-year-old occupant—whose real name was McKinley Morganfield, though he also went by “Muddy Water” (the “s” would come later)—earned his living driving a tractor, with a sideline bootlegging ditch-bank whiskey. He had a solid local reputation as a fine singer and guitarist, but no prospective full-time career in music. After Waters agreed to perform some songs in his front room, as requested, Lomax played back the recording, captured on the 16-inch discs of a Presto recording machine, there and then.

Waters had never heard himself sing, and he would later explain how hearing himself as he’d heard other musicians on the local jukebox changed something. “Man,” he reflected, “you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon, when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.” Though nearly two years would pass before Waters would quit his job and head north to Chicago, this was when the seed was sown. “I can do it,” he told himself. “I can do it.”

The rest is at the link, there isn't a paywall.

By the way: finding this as the best thread to post this article link is entirely due to Max's work on fixing the Super Search.