During the centennial year of the great folklorist Alan Lomax (1915-2002), we at AFC have been celebrating his legacy in all kinds of ways: digitizing collections, sponsoring performances, encouraging publications, creating web content, designing exhibits…even writing blog posts! One of the things we most loved about Alan was his concern that the field recordings he documented during his 70-year career made it back to artists of all kinds. In Alan’s files from his years at the Library (1934-1942), we found a typed document entitled “Duties of Alan Lomax in Connection with his Work in the Archive of American Folk Song.” Numbers 10 and 11 in this list are as follows:
10) To interest composers, educators, writers, theatre people, etc., in the Archive of American Folk Song and in folk song in general.
11) To interest commercial recording companies and commercial broadcasting companies in American folk music.
Taken together, these items on Lomax’s “to do” list demonstrate his belief (and that of the Library of Congress) that archival collections should serve not only as treasures to admire, but as inspiration to current creativity.
This attitude is certainly shared by Joshua Clegg Caffery, a recent Alan Lomax fellow in the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. Caffery has already produced a scholarly book on the 1934 recordings made in coastal Louisiana by Alan and his father John Lomax. As part of his Kluge project, he designed Lomax1934.com, a website that presents the Lomaxes’ Louisiana recordings, along with photos, catalog cards, maps, and other information from Library of Congress collections. Now Caffery, a musician whose interest in the Lomax recordings began in Louisiana but was encouraged by a visit he made to the American Folklife Center as a member of the band Feufollet in September 2006, has embarked on another project, which entails getting some of Louisiana’s finest musicians into the recording studio to record a selection of the songs the Lomaxes collected.
The project, entitled I Wanna Sing Right: Rediscovering Lomax in the Evangeline Country, is being released as a boxed set of four EPs of six songs each by the Louisiana record label Valcour Records. The CDs, which are produced by Caffery and Valcour’s Joel Savoy, present various artists and bands, mostly from Louisiana, performing their versions of songs collected by the Lomaxes. As an initiative to return archival recordings to circulation as popular songs, it fits in well with Alan’s own aims for the collection all those years ago.
Caffery agrees. “My ultimate aim is getting the music back into circulation,” he explained. “The Lomax recordings are such a vital resource, and it’s important to understand the lineage and the cultural context of the songs, but the real end game for me is always a creative one – how do you facilitate the emergence of this incredible music into contemporary culture? What’s the best way to get people to sing these songs and think about the past?”
To this, end, Caffery has spread the word about Lomax to younger musicians in particular. “I always thought the greatest review the book could receive would be to see young musicians singing from it and creating something new,” he said. In fact, however, his project includes both younger musicians and more established ones, both up-and-coming performers and Grammy-winning veterans. One of the most impressive things about the set is the presence of such masters as Michael Doucet (of the Grammy-winning Beausoleil), Ann Savoy (of Magnolia Sisters and the Savoy-Doucet Band), Zachary Richard (who was named to the Order of Canada in 2009), and the Grammy-winning all-star band Courtbouillon (Steve Riley, Wayne Toups, Wilson Savoy, and Eric Frey). Even the dean of Cajun music scholars, folklorist Barry Jean Ancelet