#john avery lomax

[nightkitchentarot]

Library of Congress Music Archives

From author Patti Digh...

... just some of the downloadable music collections and recorded sound at the Library of Congress (LC, LoC).

"The Library of Congress holds the nation's largest public collection of sound recordings (music and spoken word) and radio broadcasts, some 3 million recordings. Recordings represent over 110 years of sound recording history in nearly every sound recording format and cover a wide range of subjects and genres in considerable depth and breadth."--from LoC.gov  

MUSIC

Perhaps one of the finest features on the LC site is the National Jukebox. (10,000+ recordings) where you can find info about the collection and the recordings themselves.

"The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings. At launch, the Jukebox included more than 10,000 Victor Talking Machine Company recordings between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others."--from the “about this collection” section.

Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938 to 1943

"...primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia. The documentation was created by John Wesley Work III in 1941, and by Lewis Jones and Willis Laurence James in March, June, and July 1943. Also included are recordings made in Tennessee and Alabama (including six Sacred Harp songs) by John Work between September 1938 and 1941." –from the info section.

Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

https://www.loc.gov/collections/john-and-ruby-lomax/about-this-collection/  (info)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/john-and-ruby-lomax/ (recordings).  

"This recording trip is an ethnographic field collection that includes nearly 700 sound recordings, fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts documenting a three-month, 6,502-mile trip through the southern United States. Beginning in Port Aransas, Texas, on March 31, 1939, and ending at the Library of Congress on June 14, 1939, John Avery Lomax, Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the American Folklife Center archive), and his wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, recorded approximately 25 hours of folk music from more than 300 performers. These recordings represent a broad spectrum of traditional musical styles, including ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs."--from the info section.

Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings  (444 items)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/alan-lomax-in-michigan/about-this-collection/ (info)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/alan-lomax-in-michigan/ (recordings)

"In 1938, the Library of Congress dispatched the pioneering folklorist and song collector Alan Lomax—already a seasoned field worker at age 23—to conduct a folk song survey of the Great Lakes region. He traveled in a 1935 Plymouth sedan, toting a Presto disc recorder and a movie camera. When he returned nearly three months later, having driven thousands of miles on barely paved roads, it was with a cache of 250 instantaneous discs and eight film reels documenting the incredible range of ethnic diversity and expressive traditions primarily in Michigan.”

African-American Band Music & Recordings, 1883 to 1923 https://www.loc.gov/collections/african-american-band-music/about-this-collection/  (info)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/african-american-band-music/  (recordings)

“The core of this presentation consists of "stock" arrangements for bands or small orchestras of popular songs written by African Americans. In addition, we offer a smaller selection of historic sound recordings illustrating these songs and many others by the same composers (the arrangements might not necessarily be the same as those on the stocks). Educational materials include short biographies of composers and performers of the time and historical essays.”--from the info section.

The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America

https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/about-this-collection/ (info)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/?fa=original-format:sound+recording (recordings)

See and Hear American History Through Song "Know the songs of a country and you will know its history for the true feeling of a people speaks through what they sing."

Collection Items: View 50,082 Items

Emile Berliner collection, 500+ items, 1870s-1930 https://www.loc.gov/collections/emile-berliner/  (recordings)

“This collection showcases the work of Emile Berliner, a prominent inventor at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Overlooked by today's historians, Berliner's creative genius rivaled that of his better-known contemporaries Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and, like the works of these two inventors, Berliner's innovations helped shape the modern American way of life.”--from the introduction to this section.

Amazing Grace

https://www.loc.gov/collections/amazing-grace/about-this-collection/ (info)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/amazing-grace/ (recordings)

"This collection highlights the history of the hymn “Amazing Grace” from the earliest printing of the song to selected performances on published and field recordings. These items have been collected..."--from the info section.

The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection

https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-english-dialect-recordings-from-the-center-for-applied-linguistics/about-this-collection/  (info)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-english-dialect-recordings-from-the-center-for-applied-linguistics/ (recordings)

"The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They were drawn from various archives and the private collections of fifty collectors, including linguists, dialectologists, and folklorists. They were submitted to the Center for Applied Linguistics as part of a project entitled "A Survey and Collection of American English Dialect Recordings," funded by the Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Endowment for the Humanities.”--from the info section...

[1962dude420-blog]

Today we remember the passing of John Avery Lomax I who died January 26, 1948 in Greenville, Mississippi

John Avery Lomax I was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax (also a distinguished collector of folk music) and Bess Lomax Hawes.

The Lomax family originally came from England with William Lomax, who settled in Rockingham County in what was then "the colony of North Carolina." John Lomax was born in Goodman in Holmes County in central Mississippi, to James Avery Lomax and the former Susan Frances Cooper. In December 1869, the Lomax family traveled by ox cart from Mississippi to Texas. John Lomax grew up in central Texas, just north of Meridian in rural Bosque County. His father raised horses and cattle and grew cotton and corn on the 183 acres (0.74 km2) of bottomland that he had purchased near the Bosque River. He was exposed to cowboy songs as a child. At around nine he befriended Nat Blythe, a former slave hired as a farmhand by James Lomax. The friendship, he wrote later, "perhaps gave my life its bent." Lomax, whose own schooling was sporadic because of the heavy farmwork he was forced to do, taught Blythe to read and write, and Blythe taught Lomax songs including "Big Yam Potatoes on a Sandy Land" and dance steps such as "Juba". When Blythe was 21 years old, he took his savings and left. Lomax never saw him again and heard rumors that he had been murdered. For years afterward, he always looked for Nat when he traveled around the South

Through a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, Lomax was able to set out in June 1933 on the first recording expedition under the Library's auspices, with Alan Lomax (then eighteen years old) in tow. As now, a disproportionate percentage of African American males were held as prisoners. Robert Winslow Gordon, Lomax's predecessor at the Library of Congress, had written (in an article in the New York Times, c. 1926) that, "Nearly every type of song is to be found in our prisons and penitentiaries" Folklorists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson also had observed that, "If one wishes to obtain anything like an accurate picture of the workaday Negro he will surely find his best setting in the chain gang, prison, or in the situation of the ever-fleeing fugitive." But what these folklorists had merely recommended John and Alan Lomax were able to put into practice. In their successful grant application they wrote, following Odum, Johnson and Gordon's hint, that prisoners, "Thrown on their own resources for entertainment ... still sing, especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio, the distinctive old-time Negro melodies." They toured Texas prison farms recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues from prisoners such as James "Iron Head" Baker, Mose "Clear Rock" Platt, and Lightnin' Washington. By no means were all of those whom the Lomaxes recorded imprisoned, however: in other communities, they recorded K.C. Gallaway and Henry Truvillion.

In July 1933, they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315 pounds (143 kg) phonograph uncoated-aluminum disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as "Lead Belly," whom they considered one of their most significant finds. During the next year and a half, father and son continued to make disc recordings of musicians throughout the South.

John A. Lomax's contribution to the documentation of American folk traditions extended beyond the Library of Congress Music Division through his involvement with two agencies of the Works Progress Administration. In 1936, he was assigned to serve as an advisor on folklore collecting for both the Historical Records Survey and the Federal Writers' Project. Lomax's biographer, Nolan Porterfield, notes that the outlines of the famed WPA State Guides resulting from this work resemble Lomax and Benedict's earlier Book of Texas.

Upon Lomax's departure this work was continued by Benjamin A. Botkin, who succeeded Lomax as the Project's folklore editor in 1938, and at the Library in 1939, resulting in the invaluable compendium of authentic slave narratives: Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).

John A. Lomax served as president of the Texas Folklore Society for the years 1940–41, and 1941–42. In 1947 his autobiography Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York: Macmillan) was published and was awarded the Carr P. Collins prize as the best book of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. The book was immediately optioned to be made into a Hollywood movie starring Bing Crosby as Lomax and Josh White as Lead Belly, but the project was never realized.

In 1932, Lomax met his friend, Henry Zweifel, a rancher and businessman then from Cleburne in Johnson County, while both were volunteers for Orville Bullington's Republican gubernatorial race against the Democrat Miriam Ferguson. Lomax's old enemy, James Ferguson, was virtually running his wife's comeback attempt at the governorship.

Lomax died of a stroke at the age of eighty in January 1948. On June 15 of that year, Lead Belly gave a concert at the University of Texas, performing children's songs such as "Skip to My Lou" and spirituals (performed with his wife Martha) that he had first sung years before for the late collector.

In 2010, John A. Lomax was inducted into the Western Music Hall of Fame for his contributions to the field of cowboy music.

[woodsonresearchcenter]

Joseph Lomax's Life

A few years ago we received the Joseph Franklin Lomax materials from his brother John Lomax III. The collection is not completely ready for patrons, but in honor of Pride Month, we wanted to highlight it.

On February 19, 1949, Joseph Lomax was born into a family that loved and preserved music. His grandfather John A. Lomax and uncle Alan were famed song collectors. His father John, Jr. managed Lightnin' Hopkins, helped found the Houston Folklore Society, and recorded three albums and performed often.

Clifton Chenier, ca. 1980, photographer: Joseph Lomax

Joseph Lomax like his family never turned away from music. He documented Zydeco in the article "Zydeco-Must Live On!" from the book collection What's Going On? (In Modern Texas Folklore). He assisted the Houston Folklore Society. He co-owned Wings Press, which published the very collectible For the Sake of the Song song book by Townes Van Zandt. He began performing folk songs in the early 1980s, one of his last projects came at the Texas Tall Tellin' and Music Festival in May 1986 with frequent accompanist, Hally Wood.

Unknown, photographer: Joseph Lomax

Lomax also took photographs, lots of photographs. They detail his life in Montrose and his friends, parties at his home, photo shoots of Hally Wood and Frank Davis, nature, architecture, and his love of neon art. His collection contains many photographs of him though it's unclear if he took them.

Joseph Lomax, 1970s

In the 1970s as detailed in his journal in the collection, he began to struggle with his identity. He would later come out to his friends and family. One letter in the collection from his uncle Alan Lomax is an apology for his initial reticence to accept his nephew's sexuality.

In 1986, Joseph Lomax was diagnosed with Kaposi sarcoma and later HIV. From a set of pages dated September 16, 1986, he writes about waiting for his official diagnosis, and what comes next in his life. He struggles with giving up and assigning everything to karma and his life force being ready to leave this realm or the inverse of his karma wanting to fight. Drawing upon his work as a massage therapist, he wonders if there are alternative remedies outside the traditional medical establishment. While it's unclear what all he explored, there are photographs of him in the collection receiving acupuncture.

Sadly, Joseph Lomax passed on January 9, 1988, one of the many victims of the AIDS crisis. His memory is preserved in his collection, but also the AIDS Quilt.  His panel sparkles like his collection does.

Screenshot of Lomax's panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt website

If you'd like to hear more about Joseph from his brother John Lomax III, you can check out this link.

[connectingthediaspora]

A few images from, “ ...sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and ca. 1950 for the Archive of American Folk-Song.”  The expedition occured across the South and also to the Bahamas. Zora Neale Hurston also joined in on the expedition in Georgia and Florida. 

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/lomax/

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 28/11/2020

Huh... I expected a busier week this week but I probably got what was ahead of me just a bit earlier this week instead of anything that feels contemporary or currently relevant. I mean, yes, we do have three top 10 debuts but that’s as far as our stories go in terms of the big singles and albums I expected to have some kind of less muted impact on the chart. The big issue here is that I didn’t consider how much of a chaotic mess 2020 has been, so people really want to get straight to the festivities, if you catch my drift. Hence, with four weeks until Christmas, and a Christmas that for a lot of people will be a lot different thanks to you-know-what, we have a lot more of the holiday stuff crashing in earlier and harder than I or anyone expected. It’s still November, guys, calm down. Anyway, Ariana Grande’s “positions” spends a fifth week at #1 and welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

As always, here’s a brief rundown of what’s going on. Most of this rundown for the UK Top 75 will be holiday music, so I might as well run through the returning entries and climbers first. We have “One More Sleep” by Leona Lewis at #72, “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade at #69, “I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday” by WIzzard at #61, “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea at #55, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee at #52, “Step into Christmas” by Elton John at #49, “Underneath the Tree” by Kelly Clarkson at #46, “HOLIDAY” by Lil Nas X up to #42 off of the debut, the horribly racist and despicably awful “Do they Know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid at #38, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” by Michael Bublé at #35, “Merry Christmas Everyone” by Shakin’ Stevens at #33 and then some big gains for the Christmas songs that were already here, like “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues featuring the late Kirsty MacColl at #26 having the biggest rise of the week (there’s always controversy surrounding that song each year so it tends to surge high – also it’s an incredible song), “Last Christmas” by WHAM! at #20 and “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey already up to #14. That doesn’t mean there weren’t other gains and returning entries of course, in fact, we have some big ones, those being “Plugged in Freestyle” by Fumez the Engineer and A92 inexplicably making its way up to #39 because Irish drill is always good for the holidays I suppose. Speaking of drill, “Whoopty” by CJ is at #12 and “Loading” by Central Cee is at #34. “Get Out My Head” by Shane Codd also enjoyed continued gains up to #24. Thanks to BTS releasing their umpteenth album Be, the lead single “Dynamite” is back at #37 – more on them later. Oddly, thanks to the PlayStation 5 of all things, “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)” by Post Malone and Swae Lee returns to #30. I mean, okay, sure, it could be a worse song at that spot. Naturally, however, we have some big fallers and drop-outs because of this, so I’ll list them off starting with the fallers. Nothing survives Christmas music, and especially with UK chart rules, streaming cuts and a BTS album, everyone suffers, but especially hip-hop and R&B. In no particular categories, here’s our mish-mash of fallers: “Lemonade” by Internet Money featuring Don Toliver, Gunna and NAV at #22, “Giants” by Dermot Kennedy at #28, “What You Know Bout Love” by Pop Smoke at #29, “i miss u” by Jax Jones and Au/Ra at #31, “UFO” by D-Block Europe featuring Aitch at #32. “Holy” by Justin Bieber and Chance the Rapper at #40, “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion at #41, “Princess Cuts” by Headie One featuring Young T & Bugsey at #43, “Looking for Me” by Paul Woodford, Diplo and Kareen Lomax at #45, “Lasting Lover” by Sigala and James Arthur at #47, “Come Over” by Rudimental featuring Anne-Marie and Tion Wayne at #50, “Ain’t it Different” by Headie One featuring AJ Tracey and Stormzy at #51, “Holiday” by Little Mix at #53 (Wrong type of holiday), “Chingy (It’s Whatever)” by Digga D at #54, “Come Over” by Jorja Smith featuring Popcaan at #56, “Tick Tock” by Clean Bandit featuring Mabel and 24kGoldn at #57, “SO DONE” by The Kid LAROI at #58, “One Too Many” by Keith Urban and P!nk at #59, Jason Derulo’s “Take You Dancing” and “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)” with Jawsh 685 at #60 and #62 respectively, “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles at #64, “Mood Swings” by the late Pop Smoke featuring Lil Tjay at #67, “Deluded” by Tion Wayne and MIST at #68, “Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi at #70, “Lighter” by Nathan Dawe and KSI at #71, “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals at #73, “Papi Chulo” by Octavian and Skepta at #74, and “Confetti” by Little Mix at #75. Honestly, I can’t find much to complain about here, other than maybe “Lemonade” or “Princess Cuts”, but a lot of these were either some of the biggest hits of the year or just songs hurt prematurely by the festive season. Oh, and there’s also drop-outs from the UK Top 75 ranging in degrees of importance. Here’s just the notable ones: “Straight Murder (Giggs & David)” by Giggs featuring Dave, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” by BBC Children in Need off the top 10 debut last week and some over major hits from the Autumn-Winter season in 2020, like “Put Your Records On” by Ritt Momney, “Daisy” by Ashnikko, “For the Night” by the late Pop Smoke featuring Lil Baby and DaBaby, “Laugh Now Cry Later” by Drake featuring Lil Durk and three genuinely massive #1 hits and songs that will represent 2020 on a wider historical scale: “ROCKSTAR” by DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch after 31 weeks, “Before You Go” by Lewis Capaldi after 52 weeks and finally, “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I after 67 weeks. Okay, so “ROCKSTAR” is the only good song there but I’ll talk about these tracks in my end-of-year lists, if those happen. Now we’ve gotten through all of that, let’s discuss our new arrivals.

NEW ARRIVALS

#66 – “Blue & Grey” – BTS

Produced by Ji Soo Park, Levi, V and Hiss Noise

No, I haven’t listened to that new BTS record, even if it’s just six new songs, “Dynamite” and a skit. I don’t mind BTS or K-pop as a whole but I do like my pop music with a bit of personality that I find a lot of these idol groups kind of lack. That doesn’t mean they can’t have infectious and good songs, however, and that also doesn’t mean that they can’t display actual emotion because this song is directly about anxiety, depression and especially artist burn-out, which is a topic of all bands BTS should know well. Reading the English-translated lyrics, despite a clear language barrier, some of these lyrics are pretty poetic and I do like the use of colour imagery. Some of the lyrics seem odd, probably because if I were a Korean speaker I’d pick it up more naturally, but SUGA’s first verse is pretty concise and effective, using this metaphor of a blue question mark over his head, and J-Hope gets into some unexpected biblical territory and goes on this admittedly emo-pop trajectory that I kind of vibe with. The song itself is actually less sonically interesting than I expected, being a mostly melancholic acoustic guitar-based ballad that sure, has some pretty nice acoustic pick-ups, but doesn’t really lay an interesting enough foundation in the verses for them to flow over, especially with the awkward 808 bass and strings that are honestly a lot prettier than any of the instruments further to the front of mix. The boys sound mostly fine, and the chorus is really nicely sung, but J-Hope’s aggressive delivery and charismatic inflections, as well as some clever mixing, make his verse the clear stand-out here, at least in my opinion. For what it is, this is a damn good attempt at tackling these subjects to a young audience and I respect it, even if its meaning gets lost in imagery and could be a bit skewed thanks to how the song’s written. Otherwise, yeah, this is nice.

#65 – “Move On” – Lil Tjay

Produced by Avery on the Beat

You know, it’s odd that we have such scattered new arrivals this week and they all seem to be concentrated in little bubbles at opposite extremes of the chart. These first three are damn near consecutive and in the top 10... Well, you’ll see. For now, we have Lil Tjay of all people debuting on the chart with what seems to be the biggest single from that upcoming second record. I’m not a big fan of the guy, in fact I think he kind of ruined Polo G’s “Pop Out”, but the lead single, “Losses” was pretty okay, and I haven’t looked far enough into his work to really make a judgement. Also, despite being a typical New York Auto-Tune crooner kind of on the same level as A Boogie wit da Hoodie, he has a connection with the drill side of New York, and has collaborations with people like Fivio Foreign and the late Pop Smoke. This doesn’t really show any of that, however, rather going for a break-up track where Tjay feels like he’s going against his deeper instinct to move on from his ex-partner, even if he admits the relationship was toxic. It doesn’t help Tjay’s narrative that the song is borderline unlistenable, though. He decides to sing the ad-libs and some parts of the chorus in this tedious and nasal cadence even worse than his usual whiny voice, which is mixed way too high and he’s still somehow completely unintelligible under the layers of ugly Auto-Tune and reverb on the echoed background vocals. Also, this beat is based on a cheap acoustic guitar loop with a stiff trap skitter planted on top and bass mastering so terrible Lil Baby would be jealous of it. By the time the beat brings in some interesting electric guitar riffs, it’s fading out, and it is absolutely a sensory overload in the verses. I don’t mind the content here at all, but yeah, this sounds awful in almost every regard. Also, since this is our only “rap” song here, where’s Megan Thee Stallion’s album on the chart? Not even “Body”? Huh, I guess that’s why you shouldn’t release in the holiday season.

#63 – “This Christmas” – Jess Glynne

Produced by ???

Jess Glynne produced a cover of the Donny Hathaway classic and uploaded it as an exclusive to Amazon Music for no reason other than potentially driving up sales for that Christmas #1. It worked with Ellie Goulding’s “River” last year (which wasn’t even a Christmas song, just a Joni Mitchell cover), so let’s hope she doesn’t succeed this time. It is on YouTube, so I won’t protest that much, but honestly, why would you want to hear Jess Glynne’s cover over the Hathaway classic, with his smooth, buttery voice, soaring strings and lest we forget the pianos, bongos and that gorgeous horn section that make the relaxed single an absolute classic and one of the best options for Christmas pop, especially in the more R&B sector. With her recognisable but generic smoky-indie-girl voice, plastic-ass production on the horns, strings and especially the digital production, Jess Glynne’s cover isn’t modernised or revived, it just feels gentrified. It tries to go for a guitar solo but it’s in the back of the mix and lasts for like five seconds so what’s even the point? Lil Tjay’s song may have been terrible but this offends me more on a personal level for whatever reason, probably because I am opposed to how commercialised and cultural Christmas is nowadays, which makes the best, more grounded and down-to-Earth Christmas songs the best written and those with the most longevity... at least I think so. This won’t last, though, it’s “I Love Sausage Rolls”-tier Christmas track, and I hope it fades away soon enough.

#48 – “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – Justin Bieber

Produced by honestly, who cares?

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and (censored)ing end me. At least Jess Glynne can convincingly sell a Christmas track with her smoky, warm and powerful voice, and, you know, at least the woman can SING! Justin Bieber making a Christmas song is completely expected after his born-again-Christian ass got married and settled down with his new family, and this is pretty obvious in his songs. I mean, “Holy” is practically already a Christmas song, and even with that, it takes a more interesting Christian angle and is mostly about marriage and relationships. Bieber has made Christmas music before, yes, but as a Disney-like child star just to sell records for his big conglomerate... and wow, how Bieber hasn’t changed, since THIS is a soulless cover of the Brenda Lee classic exclusive to Amazon bloody Music. It’s not even on YouTube in full so what’s the point of listening to this all? What is the use of this? It’s not going to charity, it’s less widely-available than the original and as far as we know, it’s not connected to a wider Bieber Christmas release. When Katy Perry pulled this schtick last year, at least she had an original song – and a good one at that – to back it up. If you’re going to sell your soul to the industry devil to attempt to get a sappy Christmas song out to the public so your name creeps back into the household, at least be upfront about it, and not hiding behind your Amazon Music subscriptions. The worst part is how this is actually charting higher than Brenda Lee’s rendition. Bieber, you soulless industry puppet, put your Goddamned song on Spotify or Apple, or just don’t make it at all. You already have a Christmas standard in the form of “Mistletoe”, and that one actually kind of bumps in the sleigh, so why are you doing this? God, I’m praying for an actually good song on this chart any moment now.

#10 – “Life Goes On” – BTS

Produced by Pdogg

You could describe BTS in a lot of ways, but “alternative hip hop” isn’t what I would have expected. Thanks for that, Rolling Stone India. Anyway, this is the big album-release single from the record, and it’s about you-know-what, but more specifically finding comfort, safety and happiness during chaotic world events. They made a speech at the 75th United Nations General Assembly, because of course they did, and this was their main message: “Life goes on, let’s live on”. Honestly, it’s not a bad message and something that people do need to hear right now, even if it is more of a blanket statement than anything too specific or meaningful, and, you know what, that will definitely help this song’s longevity. I mean, that vaccine’s on its way... right? Either way, this song is pretty good. I do like that chipmunk vocal sample playing against the slick acoustic strumming – I understand this sound is all over the album – and both the falsettos from members like Jungkook and RM’s deep rap cadences work pretty well over a beat that, whilst lacking the punch you’d want for a song like this, does a good job at expressing that wish to find serenity and be calm when... you know, 2020 is happening. SUGA’s verse is short, pointless and kind of just there to get all the boys on one track, especially since he’s not really flowing that well here. It reminds me kind of how they want all of the Backstreet Boys to get on the big single to appeal to each and every fan, even if the clear stand-outs of personality will have the most success. For BTS though, I don’t see that, and I think they pretty clearly work best together when they compile all of their ideas into a mellow albeit pretty motivational track like this. I absolutely love those harmonies from Jimin and V in the outro, and whilst I don’t see this sticking around on the charts, I’ll stick around in my playlist, which is more than I can usually say for whenever the Korean lads pop up on the chart. This is our first of three consecutive top 10 entries this week though, so let’s keep going.

#9 – “Monster” – Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber

Produced by Frank Dukes, Kaan Gunesberk and Matthew Tavares

Oh... he’s back. Well, okay, Shawn Mendes sounds pretty nice over this trip-hop-adjacent steady drum beat and the really pretty, cloudy guitars, as well as some of the harmonies they end up having and the distorted guitar by the end and... man, I know “Wonder” flopped but I don’t see this sticking around either. It’s just a nothingness track and while I do like the more specific content about the uncertainties of fame and the music industry, even from the Biebs, Sure, this is pleasant but it’s clearly just radio filler and since radio doesn’t factor into the UK’s charts, I see this as a pretty profound refusal of wanting an actual hit from both Shawn and whoever that guy is next to him on the cover art. I was wondering on how to actually write this segment since I really have nothing to say about this song at all other than that. I was thinking of ignoring Bieber’s presence but that would actually give me less to talk about, so... “Monster” by Kanye West is one of his most hard-hitting tracks and definitely one of his best brag-rap bangers, with an iconic verse from Nicki Minaj and admittedly middling input from JAY-Z and Rick Ross, all stuck together by the minimal, tribal percussion that lets everyone go off and be a bit more unorthodox, as well as Bon Iver’s eerie voice caressing this beat in the intro and outro. Let’s get even newer for a song from this year, like King Princess’ beautiful piano ballad “Monster” that does a damn great job at representing the characters it was made for, those being Marceline and Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time. I’ve yet to watch Distant Lands because I want to re-watch at least the essential episodes from the original series before, but I am excited to see these characters again and in a different light. 21 Savage’s “monster” featuring Childish Gambino is a pretty damn good trap track, with an unexpected rap verse from Gambino, Paramore making a song called “Monster” for the Transformers soundtrack is the most late-2000s thing that has ever occurred – in 2011, no less, uh, I like the “Monster Mash”. I think there’s an Eminem song in there somewhere, I don’t know. Look, you get the point, I hope that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to that final song.

#8 – “Prisoner” – Miley Cyrus featuring Dua Lipa

Produced by the Monsters & Strangerz and watt

So, Miley Cyrus was a Disney teen pop star and has since been trying to carve out her musical identity to varying degrees of success, but most transitions to styles have been largely unsuccessful in terms of creating a long-term sound. You have the dance-pop, club and hip-hop-adjacent party tracks on Bangerz, the psychedelic “avant-garde” era of Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, the soft country-pop ballads on Younger Now, the ugly alternative R&B-trap-RuPaul-featuring garbage on She is Coming and finally her new, new wave sound, which can be seen in his most polished form on Plastic Hearts and its two singles, “Midnight Sky” and “Prisoner”. Miley is getting a whole bunch of sounds from a lot of different genres and styles going around in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as the hard rock, pop rock and even punk rock styles all gaining a lot of popularity at the time, and has fused them with disco and modern production to make what is basically a Blondie album if they still had their stuff together in 2020. She has got legends on this album though, like Joan Jett, Billy Idol and even Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, and honestly I really like how she’s making a female-fronted rock album that is written and performed really well and honestly should probably be her style going forward if she wants to stick with the longevity. I mean, look at “Midnight Sky”, it’s literally still at #7 staring in the face of its successor, “Prisoner”. Much like Lipa’s own “Physical”, this track interpolates Olivia Newton-John’s classic of the same name (that kind of sucks in retrospect), and does a better job than “Physical”, where Dua Lipa has much more of a presence over the drum machines and that minimal bassline that runs through the chorus really well alongside the strings and swells of guitar. This is dance-able, sure, but it’s more of a showcase of Lipa’s swagger and Cyrus’ raspy tone that really works on this album. That pre-chorus is great, especially the second time where Lipa goes solo for that last line. Honestly, my only complaint is the bridge / outro, which feels pretty under-cooked, and that there should be more inter-play between the characters on display here. Other than that, yeah, this kicks ass, and I’m just grateful this song is here and as high as it is, especially on a week like this.

Conclusion

Now, is it completely fair to give Worst of the Week to a song I can only legally listen to 15 seconds of? Yes. Absolutely. It’s going to Justin Bieber’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” on pure cynicism alone. Dishonourable Mention goes to Lil Tjay for “Move On” being an earache, with the Honourable Mention going to “Life Goes On” by BTS for just being solid all around. It’s pretty obvious where Best of the Week lies, though, so yes, it is going to “Prisoner” by Miley Cyrus featuring Dua Lipa, and it really wasn’t even close. Here’s our top 10 for this week:

Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank if you want to give me more undeserved clout and I’ll see you next week.

[moondogball]

The Animals - Animalization (MGM Records - E-4384) LP, Album, Mono 1966 G+ / VG

Animalization is the fourth American album by British R&B group The Animals. It has a track listing somewhat similar to the British album Animalisms. The album, which reached #20 on the US Billboard album chart, included three US Top 40 singles.

It was during this period that drummer John Steel left the group and was replaced by Barry Jenkins, previously of The Nashville Teens (of "Tobacco Road" fame). Both drummers appear on the cover, Jenkins on the front (upper right in brown shirt) and Steel on the back.

The Animals ‎– Animalization Sello: MGM Records ‎– E-4384 Formato: Vinyl, LP, Album, Mono País: US Fecha: 1966 Género: Rock Estilo: Blues Rock

A1 Don't Bring Me Down (Gerry Goffin, Carole King) 3:13 A2 One Monkey Don't Stop No Show (Joe Tex) 3:20 A3 You're On My Mind (Eric Burdon, Dave Rowberry) 2:54 A4 Cheating (Chandler, Burdon) 2:23 A5 She'll Return It (Jenkins, Chandler, Rowberry, Burdon, Valentine) 2:47 *not listed A6 Inside Looking Out (Alan Lomax, Chandler, Burdon, John Avery Lomax) 3:47 B1 See See Rider (Ma Rainey) 3:58 B2 Gin House Blues (Fletcher Henderson, Henry Troy) 4:37 B3 Maudi (John Lee Hooker) 4:03 B4 What Am I Living For (Art Harris, Fred Jay) 3:12 B5 Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry) 3:07 B6 I Put A Spell On You (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) 2:55

Créditos

Design [Cover Design] – Acy Lehman

Engineer – Val Valentin

Producer – Tom Wilson

Eric Burdon – vocals Dave Rowberry – keyboards Hilton Valentine – guitar Chas Chandler – bass John Steel – drums except as indicated below Barry Jenkins - drums on "Don't Bring Me Down", "Cheating", "See See Rider", and "She'll Return It"

Notas

Released on a black MGM label with the lion logo on top. Also issued in stereo (#SE-4384).

[opsikpro]

17,000 Free Streams From the Lomax Archives

[ad_1]

Musicologist, writer, and producer Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002) spent over six decades working to promote knowledge and appreciation of the world’s folk music. He began his career in 1933 alongside his father, the pioneering folklorist John Avery Lomax, author of the best-selling Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). In 1934, the two launched an effort to expand the holdings of…

[weizhentian]

Although the Texas Revolution has captured the national’s eye from time to time, it’s been mostly used for internal consumption. To captivate non-Texans, early twentieth-century Texas leaders had much more success with cowboy lore. Which is strange in its own right. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, polite Texans regarded cowboys with contempt, viewing them as unlettered ruffians with dirty jobs. In fact, evidence of this disdain for cowboy culture comes from my own great-grandfather John Avery Lomax, who claimed that his first attempt at gaining wider attention for the cowboy songs he had collected as a child in Bosque County was cruelly rebuffed. According to the story he related in his 1934 autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, in the late 1890’s English professor Morgan Callaway told him that the songs were “tawdry, cheap, and unworthy,” whereupon Lomax took his manuscript behind Brackenridge Hall and set it on fire. That reception markedly shifted a few years later when my great-grandfather attended Harvard, where professors Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge encouraged him to collect the songs and their stories, a project that led to the publication of his first book, Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads. The book also captivated former Harvard man Theodore Roosevelt, whose hand-written introduction for it endorsed it as a “work emphatically worth doing and one which should appeal to the people of all our country.”

“Is Texas Southern, Western, or Truly a Lone Star?“

[balladofamerica]

John Lomax III releases recordings of his father, John Lomax Jr., singing folk songs collected by his father, John Avery Lomax.

Family Tradition: Son Releases John Lomax Jr.'s Unearthed Folk Recordings

Son releases John Lomax Jr.'s unearthed recordings of folk songs Lomax Jr. had collected.

[haitilegends]

HISTORIC MUSIC FROM HAITI RECORDED AND ARCHIVED BY ALAN LOMAX (RIP) IN THE 1930's Alan Lomax in Haiti - Commercial (Short Version) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ4aPQ2bxzs ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI http://www.culturalequity.org/features/haiti/ce_features_lomaxinhaiti-essay.php " When 21-year-old Alan Lomax dragged 155 pounds of luggage and recording equipment into the heat and humanity of Port-au-Prince's dockside, he entered a crucible. In the Christmas season of 1936, #Haiti was re-forging a national identity after a 15-year U.S. occupation. The island nation was discovering the roots of its rural culture in Africa, struggling to reconcile the class and race issues arising from a mixed #French, #Spanish and #African #heritage, and the cosmopolitan urban culture and #folk traditions of the rural poor. Lomax, too, was coming of age in his first solo venture in ethnography, while wrestling with emotional uncertainty, romantic longing, technical challenges, sickness, and financial woes. On November 17, Harte Recordings will release Alan Lomax in Haiti, a 10-CD audio and video box set that reveals for the first time the musical and cultural fruits of that national and personal struggle. Lomax entered a society stressed by poverty and occupation. The United States took control of Haiti in 1915 to patrol sea-lanes to the Panama Canal on the eve of WWI and to preserve order for the sugar companies. In 1936, the Marines had withdrawn just two years before, leaving behind a fragile representative government. The new independence also stimulated interest in folkloric traditions, as expressed in the indigène movement and the work of Haitian classical composer Ludovic Lamothe (his only recorded performances of his own work are on the set's first disc). Though officially outlawed, #Voudou music and ceremonies attracted sensationalists in the late 1920s and early 30s, such as Hollywood zombie-movie maker William Seabrook � which provoked an understandable mistrust of the ethnographers who followed. Haiti in the #1930s was a magnet for scholars and ethnographers such as Lomax who were pursuing the trail of African-American culture to its sources in Africa. The lighter-skinned, urban upper classes identified with French culture and Catholicism, while the separateness of the undeveloped rural countryside that was home to Haiti's masses allowed African expressions to flourish and hybridize with European elements. That relatively untouched terrain brought anthropologist Melville Herskovits, dancer and writer Katherine Dunham, author (and Lomax collaborator) Zora Neale Hurston , and several other researchers, including George Simpson and Harold Courlander, to Haiti during this period. Both in the United States and abroad, the late 1930s ushered in a new era of exploration of indigenous culture, folklore and the expressions of the rural poor. The shared experience of the global Depression created fellow feeling and interest in the lives and accomplishments of ordinary people. In the U.S., these realities were being documented by artists and writers employed by U.S. Federal programs. Previous expeditions to Haiti resulted in rich descriptions; Lomax brought back sounds and images &mdash allowing them speak to us directly. Lomax came to Haiti under the auspices of the Music Division of the #Library of #Congress. The young man was already well-traveled and experienced, having begun, while still a teenager, to assist his father, John Avery Lomax, in a major effort to record African-American folk music in the U.S. Later he collaborating collaborated with Zora Neale Hurston and NYU professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle on field expeditions to the Georgia Sea Islands and migrant labor camps in Florida. Those trips pointed Lomax to the Bahamas in 1935 and then to Haiti, encouraged by Hurston, and funded, if minimally, by the Library. As the extensive and illuminating books included in the box set make clear, Lomax was confronted with scenes surpassing any he'd witnessed in even the most poverty-stricken districts of his own country. Lomax's Haiti diaries, edited by Ellen Harold, contain many evocative passages: “This morning on the mountain I walked through the whole of the lives of millions of people on the earth. A woman in a blue dress and holding her baby sat on the hard, clean, white clay of her front yard, while her man sat at the corner of their one-room hut, made of the wood, the straw, the palm leaves of that same mountain, leaned and smoked his pipe and did not look at the woman but at the fat nanny goat baaing around the corner. Down the street a little fox-terrier puppy say and shivered in the sun, ill with the disease of hunger; and all the dogs here are like that, thin and whining and shivering. I have the feeling that they and their masters mutually hate each other; they are competitors for the food supply.” Lomax complained little to his diary, reserving his energies for detailed descriptions of what he saw, but he let us glimpse his troubles: the obstacles thrown up by the Haitian bureaucracy and the near-constant requests for payment against his almost total lack of means; the lack of discs for recording; the technical limitations of his equipment (this was the last time he would use the aluminum disc-cutting recorders); debilitating fevers and dysentery resulting from malaria. And there was the anguish of separation from his young fianc�e, Elizabeth Harold &mdash resolved by an elopement and joyous reunion in Haiti, where they married. In spite of the challenges, Lomax managed to produce 1,500 recordings (fifty hours of sound) and six films, all of which were deposited in the Library of Congress. There they remained for seventy years, until a project begun by the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive in the late 1990s resulted in preservation work by the Library's American Folklife Center and The Magic Shop in New York. The aluminum discs were transferred at the Library's Sound Lab in March, 2000. The medium was not ideal, as Matt Barton, the Library's curator of sound describes: “The twelve-inch aluminum discs they used for most of these recordings could only hold about five minutes of sound comfortably, but often, they simply had to hold more. On many discs, Brad and I saw that they had allowed the recording head to keep tracking to within barely an inch of the hole in the center of the disc. This reduced the fidelity and created untold technical headaches more than sixty years after the recordings were made, but in this way, a few seconds, perhaps even a full minute more of priceless documentary recording was accomplished.” The transferred files arrived at the Magic Shop in 2006, where Steve Rosenthal and Warren Russell-Smith applied digital technology to tease out the sound from the ambient noise and what Russell-Smith calls “the coughing and wheezing of Alan Lomax's 1930s recording equipment.” The entire collection was mastered using even more advanced tools in summer of 2009. In addition to producing the box set, ACE will repatriate the entire collection to Haiti, completely restored and remastered. There, we hope to work with local people and institutions to ensure that it is used and disseminated. As a result of its sponsorship by the Green Family Foundation of Miami, which is involved in humanitarian work in Haiti, the project has been made part of the Clinton Global Initiative in Haiti. The Haiti Project is the fruit of the hard work and commitment of our partners: Warren Russell-Smith and Steve Rosenthal at the Magic Shop; Jeff Greenberg and Beldock Levine and Hoffman; Dave Katznelson and Harte Recordings; Haiti scholars Gage Averill and Louis Carl St. Jean; Kimberly Green and Anthony Colon of the Green Family Foundation; and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress." READ MORE: http://www.culturalequity.org/features/haiti/ce_features_lomaxinhaiti.php Alan Lomax Haiti Recordings "Listening" Event - YouTube http://bit.ly/1qHsm3f Gonaives - YouTube http://bit.ly/1qHsKyy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfH9Y58OXPo Instrumental Merengue - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsYDRpde1fw Merengue - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACWQCgqKD40 Haiti's Hidden Treasures By WILL FRIEDWALD During that period, the 21-year-old scholar and historian captured roughly 50 hours of sound recordings that were then buried in a U.S. government vault for more than seven decades, never seeing the light of day. Until now. READ MORE: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703837004575013090167372252 Alan Lomax in Haiti Box set http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Lomax-Haiti-Various-Artists/dp/B002FOQY7C The Recordings of Alan Lomax in Haiti in 1936-1937 - YouTube http://bit.ly/1qHqWFI Alan Lomax Obituary in Journal of American Folklore http://alanlomaxpathfinder.tumblr.com/post/61561435013/alan-lomax-obituary-in-journal-of-american Abrahams, R. D. (2004). OBITUARIES: Alan lomax (1915-2002). Journal of American Folklore, 117(463), 97. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/198462015?accountid=14214 #HAITI☆#LEGENDS #AlanLomax