Related Research Articles
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, 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.
Fred McDowell, known by his stage name Mississippi Fred McDowell, was an American singer and guitarist of hill country blues music.
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.
Shirley Elizabeth Collins MBE is an English folk singer who was a significant contributor to the English Folk Revival of the 1960s and 1970s. She often performed and recorded with her sister Dolly, whose accompaniment on piano and portative organ created unique settings for Shirley's plain, austere singing style.
Jennifer Vashti Bunyan is an English singer-songwriter. She began her career in the mid-1960s and released a debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970. The album sold very few copies and Bunyan, discouraged, abandoned her musical career. By 2000, her album had acquired a cult following; it was re-released and Bunyan recorded more songs, initiating the second phase of her musical career after a gap of thirty years. She released two more albums, Lookaftering in 2005, and Heartleap in 2014.
Jean Ruth Ritchie was an American folk singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player, called by some the "Mother of Folk". In her youth she learned hundreds of folk songs in the traditional way, many of which were Appalachian variants of centuries old British and Irish songs, including dozens of Child Ballads. In adulthood, she shared these songs with wide audiences, as well as writing some of her own songs using traditional foundations.
Alasdair Roberts is a Scottish folk musician. He released a number of albums under the name Appendix Out and, following the 2001 album The Night Is Advancing, under his own name. Roberts is also known for his frequent collaborations with other musicians and writers, as well as for being a member of the folk supergroup The Furrow Collective.
John Cohen was an American musician, photographer and film maker who performed and documented the traditional music of the rural South and played a major role in the American folk music revival. In the 1950s and 60s, Cohen was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a New York–based string band. Cohen made several expeditions to Peru to film and record the traditional culture of the Q'ero, an indigenous people. Cohen was also a professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College for 25 years.
"Banks of the Ohio", also known as "Down on the Banks of the Ohio" and "I'll Never Be Yours", is a 19th-century murder ballad, written by unknown authors. The lyrics tell of "Willie" who invites his young lover for a walk during which she rejects his marriage proposal, and once they are alone on the river bank, he murders the young woman.
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?
Isla Cameron was a Scottish-born, English-raised actress and singer. AllMusic noted that "Cameron was one of a quartet of key figures in England's postwar folk song revival – and to give a measure of her importance, the other three were Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd, and Alan Lomax". She was a respected and popular folk music performer through the 1950s and early 60s as well as appearing in several films; she focused almost exclusively on her acting career from 1966 onwards. Cameron provided the singing voice for actress Julie Christie's part in the hit 1967 film version of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, but changed career direction and became a film researcher in the early 1970s before her early death in a domestic accident in 1980. One of the traditional songs in her repertoire, "Blackwaterside", recorded by Cameron in 1962, was subsequently popularised by notable "next generation" U.K. folk music performers Anne Briggs, Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny.
Timothy Marc Plester is a British actor, playwright, and filmmaker, best known for the documentaries Way of the Morris and The Ballad of Shirley Collins - plus a multifarious number of cameo roles for film and TV.
Almeda Riddle was an American folk singer. Born and raised in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she learned music from her father, a fiddler and a teacher of shape note singing. She collected and sang traditional ballads throughout her life, usually unaccompanied. Introduced to a wider public by folklorist John Quincy Wolf and musicologist Alan Lomax, Riddle recorded extensively, and claimed to be able to perform over 500 songs.
Diane Hamilton was the pseudonym of Diane Guggenheim, an American mining heiress, folksong patron and founder of Tradition Records.
Peter Douglas Kennedy was an influential English folklorist and folk song collector throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
"All the Pretty Little Horses" is a traditional lullaby from the United States. It has inspired dozens of recordings and adaptations, as well as the title of Cormac McCarthy's 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses.
George Pickow was an American photographer and filmmaker who chronicled the folk and jazz music scenes in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries. He was married to the well-known Kentucky folk musician Jean Ritchie.
Fifth Column Films is a UK film production company best known for feature documentaries Way of the Morris and TEMPEST.
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.
Horton Barker was an Appalachian traditional singer.
References
- ↑ "The Ballad Of Shirley Collins documentary premieres in London in October". The Wire. Retrieved 19 November 2017.
- ↑ Clarke, Cath (12 October 2017). "The Ballad of Shirley Collins review – brilliant story of lost folk singer". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 April 2019.
- ↑ "The Ballad of Shirley Collins". BFI. Archived from the original on 18 September 2018. Retrieved 7 April 2019.
