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Huddie William Ledbetter, better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk and blues musician and songwriter notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "In the Pines", "Goodnight, Irene", "Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil".
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition "Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre.
Peter Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.
Delta blues is one of the earliest-known styles of blues. It originated in the Mississippi Delta, and is regarded as a regional variant of country blues. Guitar and harmonica are its dominant instruments; slide guitar is a hallmark of the style. Vocal styles in Delta blues range from introspective and soulful to passionate and fiery.
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lomax Hawes, also distinguished collectors of folk music.
"Tom Dooley" is a traditional North Carolina folk song based on the 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster in Wilkes County, North Carolina by Tom Dula. One of the more famous murder ballads, a popular hit version recorded in 1958 by The Kingston Trio, which reached No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, and also was top 10 on the Billboard R&B chart, and appeared in the Cashbox Country Music Top 20.
Willie Lee Brown was an American blues guitar player and vocalist. He performed and recorded with other blues musicians, including Son House and Charlie Patton, and influenced Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Brown is considered one of the pioneering musicians of the Delta blues genre.
Cantometrics is a method developed by Alan Lomax and a team of researchers for relating elements of the world's traditional vocal music to features of social organization as defined via George Murdock's Human Relations Area Files, resulting in a taxonomy of expressive human communications style. Lomax defined Cantometrics as the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and maintained that Cantometrics reveals folk performance style to be a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. His work on Cantometrics gave rise to further comparative studies of aspects of human communication in relation to culture, including: Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics, and Minutage.
James Carter was an American singer. He was born a Mississippi sharecropper and as a young man was several times an inmate of the Mississippi prison system. He was paid $20,000, and credited, for a four-decade-old lead-vocalist performance in a prison work song used in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
"See See Rider", also known as "C.C. Rider", "See See Rider Blues" or "Easy Rider", is a popular American 12-bar blues song that became a standard in several genres. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was the first to record it on October 16, 1924, at Paramount Records in New York. The song uses mostly traditional blues lyrics to tell the story of an unfaithful lover, commonly called an "easy rider": "See see rider, see what you have done", making a play on the word "see" and the sound of "easy".
"Inside-Looking Out", often written "Inside Looking Out", is a 1966 single by the Animals, and their first for Decca Records. It was a substantial hit, reaching number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, number 21 in Canada, and number 34 in the United States on the U.S. pop singles chart. It was the group's final single with drummer John Steel, who left shortly after its release. He was replaced by Barry Jenkins, who would go on to play with Eric Burdon and the Animals.
"Dink's Song" is an American folk song played by many folk revival musicians such as Pete Seeger, Fred Neil, Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and Cisco Houston as well as more recent musicians like Jeff Buckley. The song tells the story of a woman deserted by her lover when she needs him the most.
Bess Lomax Hawes was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax and John Lomax Jr.
Henrietta Yurchenco was an American ethnomusicologist, folklorist, radio producer, and radio host. She worked to save traditional music by recording in Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and Morocco.
John F. Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, African American Studies and Film Studies at Yale University and an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, where he previously served as the Center's Director and Professor of Music and Jazz Studies. Szwed is the author of many books on jazz and American music, including studies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, Alan Lomax and Billie Holiday.
Anna Lomax Wood is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and public folklorist. She is the president of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), established in 1985 by her father, musicologist Alan Lomax, at Hunter College, CUNY.
Travelling Man is a Granada TV series broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1984 and 1985. Created and written by Roger Marshall, one of the original writers of The Avengers, the series starred Leigh Lawson as Lomax and Lindsay Duncan as his girlfriend. Broadcast in the 9pm slot on ITV, the series drew audiences of up to 13.2 million. Each episode had its own story, within an overarching plot of Lomax searching for his missing son and hunting down those who framed him.
The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs is an album by Lead Belly and the Golden Gate Quartet, recorded for Victor Records in 1940 and released a few months later.
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 Platinum-selling 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 a 2017 feature documentary, The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Lomax' 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.
