The artist known by the single name “Francilia,” whom we featured in a recent post, was one of the most prolific singers Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded on their 1936-37 trip to Haiti. In all, they recorded 96 songs sung by Francilia, who was known in the local community as a rèn chante (queen of song). Her repertoire ranged from religious songs to secular love songs, and she performed solo and with groups. Following the repatriation of Lomax’s collection to Haiti, Haitian musicians were able to hear Francilia, and in 2019 the group Lakou Mizik recorded one of her songs in an Archive Challenge showcase sponsored by AFC. In this post, we continue to present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home, along with the Archive Challenge video of Lakou Mizik.
The disc labeled AFS 1250 features the great Haitian singer Francilia and the Sosyete Dereyal, a religious congregation of Vodou practitioners with whom she sang. Francilia was one of the most prolific singers Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded on their 1936-37 trip to Haiti. In all, they recorded 96 songs sung by Francilia, including solo songs and songs with the Sosyete. These ranged from religious songs to secular love songs. In this, our 1250th blog post at Folklife Today, we present a few of Francilia’s best songs, with links to her entire opus in their online home. It’s the first of two posts about Francilia; in the second we’ll cover her influence on Haitian music today.
There’s been a new discovery and new research into Alan Lomax’s fieldwork in the 1930s! On the John W. Kluge Center’s blog Insights, Antony Stewart, British Research Council Fellow at The Kluge Center, describes a notebook recently discovered by AFC’s Alan Lomax curator, Todd Harvey. The notebook was used by Lomax during his 1936-1937 field …
