I’ve been slowly working my way through John & Alan Lomax’s Our Singing Country, a book of transcriptions of field recordings made in the early-to-mid 1930s. In the introductions (there are several) they mention that copies of the recordings, which were made for the Library of Congress, are commercially available at cost (that was in the 40s, and is naturally no longer true). I was just now poking around the Library of Congress website via Google to try to find out if these recordings are available somehow (preferably for free, the equivalent of “at cost” for music these days). As far as I can tell, they are not. However, John Lomax’s more famous 1939 recordings are!
memory.loc.gov/ammem/lohtml/lohome.html
Over 20 hours of recordings, 686 of them (as well as all of Lomax’s relevant notes), there on the internet for everyone to hear. I don’t know when I’ll find time to listen to all that, but I’m pretty excited to start. Tomorrow. Because it’s quarter after two.
That’s really cool!! We should start a list of gems we find in there… In the comments?
We could try… but I’m pretty sure I’m going to love all of it. I think I might just review the whole damn collection, disc by disc. On account of it is TOTALLY AWESOME!
Also, other stuff:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/collections:@field%28FLD003%2B@band%28origf%2BSound%2BRecording%29%29:heading=Original%2BFormat:%2BSound%2BRecordings