In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Library of Congress commissioned John A. Lomax to traverse the country, recording American folk music at it’s source. Thousands of songs were recorded and catalogued as part of the fabric that makes up our national heritage.
Nearly 50 years later, Stephen Wade tracked down neighbors, friends, and next of kin to a dozen artists that were recorded. Part of his project was issuing royalty checks to surviving family - many of whom were just learning about the existence of these recordings.
From The Beautiful Music All Around Us by Stephen Wade:
Now, forty-six years later, we scoured East St. Louis, Illinois, for a high-grade photocopier able to reproduce Ora Dell’s sole portrait. A few days before, [Leon] Milton first learned that his aunt had made some recordings. In the fall of 1940, the year she turned twelve, Ora Dell stood before her classmates in her school auditorium. As John A. Lomax operated a disc recorder, she performed a handful of songs that she animated with dance steps, hand clapping, and vocal effects. Three of these numbers, along with the earliest published recordings of Muddy Waters, subsequently appeared on an album of African American blues and game songs issued by the Library of Congress. This news came as a surprise to Milton. He listened patiently to the story, one that included a government library that until now he had never heard of. On our way to another strip mall with possibly a better duplicator than the machine we just tried, his reserve finally gave way. “Why,” he asked heatedly, “would anyone care about a little black girl from Mississippi?”
This passage broke my heart to read, because of the obvious admiration that Leon showed for his aunt in the introduction of the chapter. He still kept her photo on the dash of his car, weathered and cracked from decades in the sun. Folk music is such an important part of who we are and where we came from, but it’s certainly not immune to appropriation. The previous chapter focused on the song “Rock Island Line” - an immediate memory to me of my granddad’s voice, along with Johnny Cash. Lonnie Donegan made the tune “famous”, but the archived version was written by an African American’s booster club chapter for the Rock Island Railroad. The field recording was performed by Kelly Pace, a Black inmate held in Arkansas.
Having grown up in Mississippi in the wake of Emmett Till, Leon’s question isn’t surprising, but it shows that we’re too unaware of where the roots grow from, for what we currently enjoy - from clothing, to music, to food - the list goes on and on
Ora Dell Graham - “Pullin’ the Skiff”
“Shortenin’ Bread”
Thank you for sharing these stories and songs, Chris. Is this the book you've chosen for class? It sounds amazing.
ReplyDeleteYes, it’s the book that I’ve chosen for class. It’s one that’s sat on my shelf for a few years, and I’m glad for a chance to go through it and do some digging into our past. I don’t think I expected to connect with it as much as I am.
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