You may not be familiar with the name Alan Lomax, but chances are you’ve heard of blues legends Lead Belly and Muddy Waters.
Lomax was a pioneer of field recording such musical forefathers in the 1930s, capturing live performances across the U.S. that would have been lost if not for his drive and love of traditional, folk and roots music.
Two-time Juno winner Jayme Stone fell fast and hard for Lomax’s work and recordings and decided to pay homage to the man and his material with The Lomax Project, a 19-song, 54-page booklet, including photo essays, capturing Stone’s journey throughout the project.
Stone will bring The Lomax Project to The Banff Centre’s Margaret Greenham Theatre on Thursday (Feb. 19), accompanied by Margaret Glaspy (vocals), Eli West (guitar, vocals), Brittany Haas (fiddle) and Joe Phillips (bass).
“We’re working with songs that were collected by Alan Lomax and his father John,” Stone said. “Alan began working in the field with his dad when he was 17 and they started largely in the south and their first set of field trips were at penitentiaries.
“They were particularly interested in African American folk songs and they felt like if they went to prisons where people had been out of circulation and away from commercial culture, for the most part for years, they might remember the oldest songs.”
The Lomax’s had the questionable idea of collecting authentic folk songs from all corners of the U.S., including nefarious Angola Prison in Louisiana, where they recorded Lead Belly while doing time on an assault charge.
“Regardless, they managed to collect some amazing music. They were the first to record Lead Belly and Muddy Waters and, by and large, unknown people who were labourers, sea captains, cowhands, homemakers and school kids. They would record at churches, camp meetings and barn dances and mostly front and back porches,” Stone said.
The Lomax’s wanted the rough, homemade folk music that people made for their enjoyment.
“When I took up the banjo 20 years ago I read a book called The Land Where the Blues Began that Alan Lomax had written and it made me aware of field recordings and I started listening to not only the recordings mentioned in those books, which were largely blues recordings, but I was listening to field recordings. I also used to mail order tapes from the Smithsonian folk archive that weren’t recorded by Lomax, but were also a whole other treasure trove of field recordings,” Stone said.
The music stayed with him and had an immense impact on his career.
“I’ll learn things from source recordings and I like to trace things back and find the providence of the songs that I play and I made some field recordings of my own when I travelled to west Africa in preparation for a record I made called From Africa to Appalachia,” Stone said.
“It’s just been a part of what I do and basically what happened was maybe three years ago I read John Szwed’s book Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, an incredible biography and everything just kind of lit up. It just kind of came full circle to those early explorations and I realized it was a thread that ran through all of my work and I realized too how indebted we are to the preservation work that Alan did.
“So many of the songs that I love come from these old recordings and then it was also just an opportunity to dig deep into this particular folklorist collection.”
Stone felt as if he “fell down the rabbit hole for the last few years” just listening to thousands of recordings and going to the Library of Congress to do research, reading and listening, trying to find old lost, musical gems.
“The heart of this project is really the collaborative process. I invited musicians that I love to come together and dust off these old recordings and together make new arrangements of them and bring them to life once again,” Stone said.
“I had been thinking of a way to collaborate with other musicians and focus on a particular scene and kind of curate that while giving people lots of space. I put those things together and it seemed like the Lomax collection would be the perfect thing to use as our jumping off point.”
