Alan Lomax (1915–2002)

Think of this volume as a folk music equivalent of a Greek Tragedy: It's a great book with a fatal flaw.

It's a great book because it is one of the largest collections of American folk songs ever published. There is no question but that it was a seminal production.

The problem is, the songs have been Lomax-ized.

This is an old, old problem in folk music publications. Percy's Reliques started the trend: Take an old song and rewrite and refine and don't admit to it -- and even if the author does show more admit to it, he doesn't list where he made changes.

This is not to absolutely reject rewriting. If a song collector finds a version of a song which lacks a key verse, and wants to include it in a book for general audiences (and this book was intended for popular audiences), then the collector needs to put in that verse. But put it in [brackets] to show that it is spurious, and list the source for the interpolation.

And, while he's at it, he needs to list from whom the song was collected, and where, and when.

This volume fails on all these counts. And the Lomaxes did an incredible amount of tampering. Bottom line: There are a lot of great songs here. There is also a lot of very, very bad scholarship. If all you care about is the songs, by all means, pick up this book. But don't trust anything it says unless you can (for instance) verify it against the Lomax field recordings. Those, at least, are highly valuable and unadulterated. show less

This compilation houses the psalms of America’s dead soul. It’s a spinning vortex, a time capsule, a grimy window showing a wide, open plain, a road map for accessing a mysterious, remote America – an America not yet stained filthy with strip malls and fast food chains and parking lots, untamed by instant coffee and plastic siding and double gulp sodas. This is a world filled with undocumented past, before the creeping reach of photography and television wires and laptops blasted all show more perspective of space and time.

These are songs sung in flophouses and beside campfires. Theses are songs about lovelorn mornings, sweating hot afternoons, dark nights pierced by lonesome train whistles. Amazing show less

Like many things in Lead Belly's life, this book probably came a little too late.

Lead Belly (the way Huddie Ledbetter preferred to spell his nickname) was a genuinely seminal force in American folk music, but that was only partially realized while he was alive -- it wasn't until half a year after he died that his song "Goodnight Irene" was made into a megahit by The Weavers and his name became known to a wider community. There are many recordings of Lead Belly, but there wasn't an attempt to show more really study him comprehensively in his lifetime.

This posthumous book tries to help fill the gap. And if all you want is words and music of a lot of Lead Belly songs, it should serve your needs well.

Where it falls down is in the notes. Co-author Alan Lomax was one of America's greatest folk music scholars -- but he had a tendency (derived from his father, and found in books other than this one) to substitute cutesy anecdotes for actual information. Worse, the Lomaxes had been responsible for getting Lead Belly out of prison -- and they seem to have had a rather superior attitude toward their find, which they showed by claiming arrangement, or even co-authorship, credits on Lead Belly's songs. What odds, in a case like that, that they will tell the full story of its background?

In addition to the songs, the book contains several short essays and tributes to Lead Belly, which are interesting and information -- but they don't add up to a full biography. It's another example of the "not quite"-ness of this book.

If any of those things matter to you, this may not be the ideal book for you. On the other hand, there is no other book with so much Lead Belly influence. So, if you are a Lead Belly fan, odds are that this is the book for you. show less

I didn't read the whole book; I skimmed a lot of the text and skipped ahead to the music. There's a lot to discover in here. There are a few (now) popular songs everyone knows and loves, alongside (equally good) songs you've probably never heard of. But I find most of the songs are different versions of songs I know -- such as "Amazing Grace" with an unrecognizable melody, or "Yankee Doodle" with words about fighting the Civil War (and no mention of macaroni).

The book is sort of torn between show more being a songbook for general readers and being a sort of reference for people with a scholarly interest in American folk songs; whether it's the best of both worlds or the worst, I guess depends on what you're looking for. The Lomaxes combined different versions of songs, picking the bits they happened to think were best (not most representative), which makes for more of a popular songbook than anything else. But they also leave out any harmonization (ironically, for the sake of not editing), and they include songs which have no written music and songs which cannot be notated (but they approximate notating them anyway), so there's a lot of content which is useless as a songbook but potentially interesting as a reference work.

That duality has a lot to do with why I like the work of the Lomaxes. They were the sort of people who wrote arrangements for their field recordings. For people like me who are just interested in good music, not in "scholarly" accuracy, it's perfect. show less