We can’t say we know you personally but if you’re anything like our baseless assumptions of you then you spend hours everyday trawling the internet in search of the next big thing. It’s a sad fact of the internet that people aren’t willing to use this resource with its great wealth of archived material to learn more about the past, instead always trying to be the first of a certain group to discover and share something.
It’s understandable in a way. Spotify and iTunes have their “recently released” tabs whereas classic albums only ever have those tedious re-releases which come laden down with painful amounts of b-material that the artist at the time didn’t consider worthy of releasing to the world. It’s for this reason that the Alan Lomax Archive channel on YouTube, with its incredible catalogue of American folk music recorded by the great archivist in the late ’70s/early ’80s is largely uncelebrated online despite how time-consumingly brilliant it is.
Lomax is best known for his earlier audio recordings of American folk music for the Library of Congress, which led him to record with such icons of early 20th Century music as Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. These videos were recorded in very rural parts of the US, namely the Appalachian Trail, rural Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta, and yes, the urge to laugh at some of these humble stereotypes in their natural environment is there for a modern post-Deliverance audience. What’s undeniable is that these musicians – many of them amateurs – perform their songs with a profound amount of soul, the kind many modern musicians might do well to adopt.
This is music in its purest form; no booking fees, no curfews, just playing.
(By the way, if you are the kind of person who does love being on the cutting edge, Vincent Moon just got off a several year long trip across the world in the same spirit of archiving as Alan Lomax and he too has his own YouTube channel which is worth checking out.)
Boyd Rivers & Ruth May Rivers – Come Out The Wilderness
There’s remarkably little info online about Boyd Rivers, whose effortlessly natural blues singing would surely have propelled him to some sort of respectful prominence had he managed to come along a mere twenty years sooner. They two minute preamble on this video shows the dynamics between Rivers and his wife, whose own voice wonderfully contrasts that of the guitar man.
Heavenly Gospel Singers – Sit Down Servant and Rest Awhile
The black churches of the South were the source of much of what would eventually become popularly known as soul music. The charismatic leader of the Heavenly Gospel Singers here performs his part with a huge amount of personality, so much that you’d be excused for recalling the image of Barry White, whose subject matter may have been somewhat less geared towards the divine, but whose belief was comparable to these true believers.
Napolian Strickland – Diddley-bow Medley
There’s no other way to describe it; this is a man playing the blues with a plank of wood nailed to a door-frame. You think of how many modern artists spend a fortune on elaborate computers and electronic equipment and then you watch this video, you’ll realise that the spirit of blues music is all about overcoming chaos and turning it into something beautiful. Let’s face it, Napolian Strickland was never going to sell out the Olympia, but does that really matter?
Sam Chatmon – Make Me A Pallet On The Floor
Behind the grey beard and the wrinkles you can just make out a sly grin when Sam Chatmon finishes singing the rather suggestive folk standard Make Me A Pallet On The Floor. In the preamble he talks about first picking up a guitar at four years old and the idea of carrying a guitar around with a string around your neck paints a fairly vivid image of the simple lives that created this incredible music. No wires, no amps, no cases, no nonsense.
St. James Missionary Baptist Church of Canton – Wade In The Water
The spontaneous nature of singing in the Baptist churches in the South is beautifully captured in this video. The gospel standard Wade in the Water is taken on by a church full of believers who are led by a number of singers who sing without preparation, quite literally waiting for the spirit to take them over. The song fades into existence and then fades back out again. We may not have absconded from the Church so early in our youth here if Sunday mornings passed like this.
Kid Thomas Band – I Love You
A standard Dixieland jazz band, these guys represented the exact moral opposite to what the gospel music above believed in. Where gospel was a form of praising God, jazz – born in the brothels of New Orleans as it was – was always about sex. That made it evil. So here is the interminably evil Kid Thomas Band performing the sinful I Love You at the legendary Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Holly Spring Harp Convention – Hallelujah
It was not only the black churches in America that played host to some truly gorgeous spiritual music, as we see from this video of the Holly Spring Harp Convention. The balance between huge voices and strictly defined vocal registers is something to be marvelled at. It’s religious music in the spirit of Bach’s greatest choral works and its humble setting makes it all the more impressive.
Doodle Thrower & Golden River Grass – Mountain Dew
This video is all dungarees and banjos and the arrival towards the beginning of the particularly spherical Strawberry Tifton is almost too stereotypically deep South to tolerate. But at the same time it is a remarkably unselfconscious vision of the sound of bluegrass music without the nostalgia that inflects so much of it nowadays.
The Alan Lomax Archive Channel features many more gems like these, from blues to Cajun to jazz to whatever else was going on in rural parts of the US around the late ’70s to early ’80s. The channel also features a large amount of interviews about life in these parts of the world in the early part of the 20th Century. These selections only scratch the surface of what the Alan Lomax Archive Channel has to offer. If you were tickled by a one of them you’ve a long stretch of procrastination ahead of you.