
This year the GRAMMY awards promise to be exciting for music fans everywhere, but especially fans of the American Folklife Center. At least four of the nominees have connections to the AFC archive: Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” from the album Lemonade, which uses samples of two songs from the Alan Lomax collection; a box set of Moroccan music recorded for the archive by the author and composer Paul Bowles in the 1950s called Music of Morocco from the Library of Congress; a box set of early recordings of the sacred songs of Protestant camp meetings and revivals from the 1890s called Waxing the Gospel, which includes two recordings from the archive; and I Wanna Sing Right: Rediscovering Lomax in the Evangeline Country, presenting contemporary Louisiana artists performing their own versions of songs they learned from John and Alan Lomax’s 1934 field recordings from coastal Louisiana.
Obviously, we’re excited that so much material from our archive is either up for a GRAMMY itself, or inspiring creative artists to make their own GRAMMY-nominated music. We wish all the artists and labels good luck, and to the GRAMMY voters we can only say, “If you like it, then you better put a GRAMMY on it!”
Comments (2)
It’s one thing to discuss use of material from this or that archive. It’s notable. But the article’s “We wish all the artists and labels good luck, and to the GRAMMY voters we can only say, ‘If you like it, then you better put a GRAMMY on it!'” sounds like an advertisement.
Thanks for your comment. We do not endorse any nominee. As the post says, we wish ALL the artists and labels good luck, whether they used archival material or not. The second comment conveys that the voters should vote for the nominees they like, not any particular nominee. (In any case, voting had been over for some time by the time this post was made.) In neither case do we mean to suggest that any particular nominee should win.