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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s

Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s

Stone, Jonathan W.

Paperback

Black American StudiesWorld Music

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0472038559
ISBN13: 9780472038558
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: Nov 29 2021
Pages: 258
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the American Negro in several southern African American prisons. Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes' field recordings--including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton--contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element--a sonic rhetoric--for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power of folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes' archive and other repositories of historicized sound.

Throughout Listening to the Lomax Archive, there are a number of audio resources for readers to listen to, including songs, oral histories, and radio program excerpts. Each resource is marked with a ♫ in the text. Visit https: //doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9871097#resources to access this audio content.

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