Alan Lomax at Parchman Farm

Earlier this year, much of Alan Lomax's life's work was placed online.

Lomax was one of the 20th Century's most prominent collectors of folk music. He started recording American musicians in the field with his father in 1933 for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. This project continued until 1942, and the material gathered over those nine years includes famous sessions with Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Unfortunately, those are not the recordings that are now available gratis. It turns out that the best things in life are sometimes owned by the federal government and, inexplicably, only available from small independent record labels for an extortianate sum.

In 1946, Lomax began recording on his own using tape (rather than aluminum and acetate discs), and he continued into the 1990s, traveling the world in order to preserve aural traditions. This later set of recordings, 17,400 audio files in all, is the collection that has been digitized and made available by the Association for Cultural Equity.

Alan Lomax at the 1979 Mississippi Delta Blues Festival in Greenville, Mississippi. Photo by Bill Ferris, from the William R. Ferris Collection.Taken from Field Trip South.

During 1947 and 1948, Lomax recorded the inmates on Parchman Farm. Parchman, as I've discussed below, was an infamous prison plantation. Convicts were forced to work, and the labor conditions inside the prison were largely indistinguishable from slavery. In order to pace their work, the inmates would sing. And the songs were good. Lomax observed, "I had to face that here were the people that everyone else regarded as the dregs of society, dangerous human beings, brutalized and from them came the music which I thought was the finest thing I’d ever hear coming out of my country.[1]"

While researching Parchman, I came across an album of songs from the 1947-1948 recording sessions that had been released in 1997. All of the music was wonderful, but one song haunted me: Jimpson's rendition of "No More, My Lord." Jimpson isn't exactly as well known as Lead Belly, but you may have heard his voice without realizing it. A version of "Murderer's Home," sung by Jimpson, is featured on the Gangs of New York soundtrack. To listen to any of these songs, just visit the Association for Cultural Equity's sound recording home page, and use the search bar on the right to look for music by Jimpson.

"No More, My Lord," is a fantastic song in its own right, but what I really love is a moment specific to the second recording that Lomax made. Most of the way through the two minute track, the usual axe-stroke beat is followed by syncopation: two unexpected strikes. During the song, Jimpson is actually chopping wood. The surprising percussion is a wood chip striking Lomax's microphone and rebounding off of it.

Those two small beats encapsulate, in many ways, what I love about recordings of live music. Studio albums, as sanitized as they tend to be these days, are not linked with specific times and places. In some ways, this is an advantage: a listener can, by playing an album obsessively (as I tend to do) associate the music with anything (this can lead to some odd connections; The Lord of the Rings will forever be linked with Radiohead's Amnesiac in my mind). On the other hand, live recordings, and this is particularly true of the best of them (Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival or The Band at Winterland in '76), evoke a specific time and place.

The wood chip striking Lomax's microphone draws the listener, however subtly, into the world of Parchman Farm, where the music is always undergirded and overshadowed by brutal force and its effects. Because Jimpson sings the blues, the disturbing power relations that form the song's context do not distract from its beauty and emotional impact; they amplify them. The pain that forms the basis for Jimpson's music - the pain that the music is meant to assuage - is, by accident, made manifest to the listener.

The other reason I love that moment is that it sounds good. That flying piece of timber may have been a mistake, but it was a felicitous mistake: the beats fit the song. I find this example of contingent beauty comforting; I hope that moments like these were plentiful at Parchman, and helped to soften the Sisyphean existences of the men who worked there.

Thanks for reading.

J