04 - Let Us Not Praise Famous Men

The Lomaxes are well-known for the recordings they made of artists who went on to become famous and influential figures in traditional and popular music alike: Lead Belly, Bessie Jones, Woody Guthrie, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters. But there are countless wonderful singers and players in the Lomax collections about whom we know next to nothing or nothing whatsoever, and this episode focuses on some of them, with music from Memphis, Cajun Louisiana, Morocco, Sint Eustatius, Romania, and two songs from the Mississippi Delta (one by way of Detroit).1. Unidentified woman: All Power Is In His Hands. Recorded at the Coahoma County Agricultural High School, Coahoma, Mississippi, July 1942. 2. Cecil Augusta: Crawford's Jump. Memphis, Tennessee, October 1959. [Since this episode was produced, we have discovered "Cecil Augusta" was Lomax's garbling of the name of Augustus Crowford.)3. Sampson Pittman with Calvin Frazier: I Been Down the Circle Before. Detroit, Michigan, November 1938. 4. Unidentified: Strigaturi. Dragus, Romania, August 1964. 5. Alice Gibbs: Jerusalem Cuckoo (I Am A Donkey Driver). St. Eustatius (Statia), 1967.6. Unidentified: Cajun mazurka. Kaplan, Louisiana, 1934. 7. Unidentified Amazigh man: Al-Hamdulillah (Thanks Be to God). Aguelmouss, Ouarzazate, Souss-Massa-Drâa, Morocco. September 1967.

Om Podcasten

"Been All Around This World" explores the breadth and depth of folklorist Alan Lomax's seven decades of field recordings. From the earliest trips he made through the American South with his father, John A. Lomax, beginning in 1933, to his last documentary work in the early 1990s, the program will present seminal artists and performances alongside obscure, unidentified, and previously unheard singers and players, from around America and the world, drawn from the Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. It hosted by Nathan Salsburg, curator of the Alan Lomax Archive, alongside co-host and producer Michael Cormier-O'Leary, program coordinator at the Association for Cultural Equity, the non-profit research center and advocacy organization that Lomax founded in 1983. (Photo of Alan Lomax by Peter Figlestahler.)