Southern Journey (Revisited)

The Southern Journey is the popular name given to a field-recording trip around the Southern States of the US by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. He was accompanied on the trip by his then-lover, English folk singer Shirley Collins. It resulted in the first stereo field-recordings in the Southern United States and the "discovery" of Mississippi Fred McDowell. The music collected on the trip has had a significant impact on the development of popular music. Tracks recorded on the trip were sampled by Moby for his album, ''Play''. It also served as the inspiration for the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' film, ''O Brother Where Art Thou''. The Southern Journey is the subject of an autobiography by Shirley Collins entitled ''America Over the Water''. It is also the subject of s 2017 feature documentary, ''The Ballad of Shirley Collins''. Lomax's own recollections of the trip were documented in his autobiography, ''The Land Where Blues Began'', which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1993.

Build-up

In 1958, Lomax had returned to America after a decade recording the traditional music of Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; producing radio and television series for the BBC; and compiling the eighteen-volume '' World Library of Folk and Primitive Music'' for Columbia Records. His voluntary exile had been in no small part prompted by the inception of the McCarthy witch hunts, which had a particular hunger for Lomax’s folk-music peers.

On his return to New York City following the death of McCarthy in 1957, he found an urban folk revival in full bloom. Crowds of young banjo players, guitarists, fiddlers, and fans were gathering in Washington Square Park to pick and sing traditional songs and tunes, many of which Lomax had recorded years earlier from musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Hobart Smith, and Texas Gladden. The revival was to some extent driven by access to these earlier recordings at Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, where they had access to hundreds of songs in albums, books (among them Lomax's ''American Ballads and Folk Songs and Our Singing Country''), and burgeoning folk-music magazines such as ''Sing Out!''. Lomax himself was somewhat sceptical about the burgeoning scene he encountered, and on some level it proved to be the catalyst for the Southern Journey collecting trips. He commented 40 years later:

Lomax began making arrangements for a field recording trip throughout the American South using a prototype Ampex 600 Series stereo recorder. He secured support from Ahmet Ertegun and Nesuhi Ertegun, of Atlantic Records. Lomax was accompanied by the young British folksinger Shirley Collins, whom he had met in London several years earlier. They had begun a relationship before Lomax moved back to New York, and with the trip impending, he invited her to accompany him to act as his assistant. They left New York City in a Buick Roadmaster in late August 1959.

The Southern Journey

Recording started on August 24 in Bluefield, Virginia, where the pair recorded an old subject of Lomax's, the banjo virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Hobart Smith. For the next two months the pair traveled through Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, making over 70 hours of recordings. The project was shorter than every other major recording trip of Lomax's career. It marked the first stereo recordings made of American traditional music in the field, at last doing justice to the sonic complexity of the Georgia Sea Island ring shouts, the many-voiced work songs of the Southern prison farms, and the thunderous hymnody of the Sacred Harp. But perhaps its greatest achievement was the discovery of farmer and bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Itinerary

1960 trip

in 1960, Lomax was invited to Williamsburg, Virginia, to serve as music supervisor to a historical film being produced by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He used the occasion to do a follow-up tour of coastal Virginia and Georgia, recording again with many of the artists from the 1959 trip, as well as several new artists. Lomax and Collins had split up by this time, and she had returned to England, where two albums worth of material recorded by Lomax and Peter Kennedy before the Southern Journey had recently been released. Lomax was instead accompanied on the 1960 trip by his young daughter, Anna Lomax, who would later go on to found the Association for Cultural Equity.

Release history

When Lomax returned to New York City in late October 1959, he prepared seven albums for Atlantic, which were released as the "Southern Folk Heritage Series". There was much music left over, however, and Lomax ultimately made an arrangement with Prestige Records to issue another series entirely – twelve album volumes under the title "Southern Journey". This latter series featured the new recordings made by Lomax and his daughter Anna in 1960.

Numerous other issues and reissues of material from the recordings includes:
* In 1971, German record label GHP released a solo imprint of the Mountain Ramblers recordings made in Hillsville, Virginia.
* In 1977, New World Records

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