Hi Joe,

If you mean ordering the field recordings directly from the Archives of Traditional Music, it would cost you. I had old cassette research copies from my research there in the late '90s. But, now that it's digitized, I ordered the full archive last summer of the earliest 7-inch aluminum discs (285 items) and the later 10-inch Presto discs (220 items). They emailed them to me as Zip files, and sent accompanying printed master indexes. Anyone could order, I assume, by contacting the ATM. But, I'm sure what you're getting at/wondering about is the expense! -- It was expensive, more than $250.

Going through his earliest 7-inch recordings from the latter 1920s is very tedious. The sound quality is not acceptable for general purposes. The recording speed is accelerated and the surface noise makes listening very difficult. But, it's intriguing for me. There are many
items that one can immediately recognize and match to commercial blues parallels from the time period. Bruce Conforth is absolutely right about that, and I always agreed: Gellert collected a lot of non-protest material in common circulation.

Actually, as it appears, Gellert in his earliest novice inroads into black music collecting may have just asked local people to sing and (not literally, of course) "hit" the record button; he didn't have any guiding theory or any grounding in black folklore. These locals, quite naturally perhaps, just sang him songs that were current in their minds, many of them commercial blues, songster, and string band stuff. Then, as these earliest field items progress in sequence in the archive, it seems that the blues and popular stuff falls away. There start to be more and more chain gang songs and even the first examples of more than one singer present. You can hear another singer-informant in the background making the "hunh" sound of a work song, for instance, and you can hear a singer-informant stop short, laugh, and say, "That's all," presumably to Gellert on another recording. But, they are very hard to make out these early ones.

Here's my theory of what the early archive items tell us -- Gellert had gone from more casual recording of whatever at homes to starting to record in a more focused and informed way in prisons.

Then, by the 1930s, he was pursuing it on more serious and systematic terms, with the new better equipment at his disposal. The recordings released on Rounder and Heritage are from the '30s Presto 10-inch discs. Many of them sound very good.

You've likely encountered this one. Someone did us a favor by posting it at Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8xqOeaEJ-I
That's one of the ones that Bruce Bastin writes about in his book.

It's on the original Rounder LP, which is still around:
http://www.discogs.com/Various-Negro-Songs-Of-Protest/release/3451682

Also, here's the second LP release:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/171709121593?ul_noapp=true&chn=ps&lpid=82

Finally, do you know about the Document Records CD? (currently out of stock, though):
http://www.document-records.com/fulldetails.asp?ProdID=DOCD-5599
There are song samples there, at least.

That Document CD is a reproduction of the third Gellert release, Conforth and Bastin's "Nobody Knows My Name."

All of these LPs, draw on the good-quality 10-inch Presto items in the full Gellert archive. They are all from the mid-1930s. Once Gellert was gone from the scene (disappeared) as of 1979, Conforth did us all right by working through the material to put out these important compilations! The average listener, in the '80s and still now, is not going to be ordering field recordings directly from an archive.

Glad the article came through.

Best,
Steve