It would take a year to listen to everything Alan Lomax recorded. Father and son also recorded countless non-professional performers who added significant panels to the quilt of 20th- century music. Just as the father had discovered the great Leadbelly, so the son was a key figure in the emergence of Son House, Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell. But whereas Smith compiled recordings that, if sometimes obscure, had already been released into the commercial arena, Lomax went out and found the music for himself, the way he had been taught by his father, John Lomax, a leading folk-song collector of the previous generation. The other is Harry Smith, the eccentric polymath whose anthology of recordings of American vernacular music, originally issued in 1952, inspired BobDylan and other members of the Greenwich Village folk-music revival before exerting a powerful influence over a more recent return to old values. Lomax is one of two men whose names are particularly venerated by enthusiasts of roots music. And without Alan Lomax, the young man with the tape recorder, it might have vanished without trace. It has every significant ingredient: the "cry" of the blues, the elemental backbeat, a call-and-response format reminiscent of black church music, and the collective polyphony that distinguished the earliest jazz before re-emerging as a strategy of the 1960s avant-garde. Today, Early in the Mornin' sounds like a message from the heart of African America. Murderers' Home became a key text for the young British musicians who taught America to love its own music in the early 1960s. Afterwards he carefully records the names by which they are known to their fellow prisoners: 22, Little Red, Tangle Eye, Hard Hair.Ī few years later their song, Early in the Mornin', would become part of an LP called Murderers' Home, in which the young man compiled the music he had recorded on Parchman Farm, the vast plantation to which the state of Mississippi sent its criminals. He is capturing the song that these prisoners are singing, a song that has emerged from its environment as naturally as the tree they are attacking. Off to one side sits a young white man, manipulating a cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorder. As they strike, the four voices weave together. First north and south strike in unison, then east and west, then north and south again, and so on. On each backbeat, two blades slice into the tree with a crisp slap. Stationed at the four points of the compass, they are singing as they swing their axes, taking their timing from the song. O ne hot Mississippi morning in 1947, four men in broad-striped prison uniforms are standing around a live oak tree, cutting at its trunk with long-handled axes.
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