News/Programs2/12 REPATRIATION IN COMO, MISSISSIPPIComo to celebrate 'Hill Country Blues' Feb. 3 Como will host a "Hill Country Blues Celebration" Friday, February 3, to mark the "Repatriation of Como, Mississippi Recordings, Photographs and Videos from the Alan Lomax Collection" and the loan of the Hill Country Blues Photography Collection from the Jessie Mae Hemphill (JMH) Foundation to the Emily Jones Pointer Library. The event from 4 to 6 p.m. at the library on Como's Main Street will include performances by Sharde Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, The Como Mamas and Glen Faulkner, said Como librarian Alice Pierotti who is helping plan and coordinate activities. "This is about children's education," Pierotti said. "I want the kids to understand and be proud of their musicial heritage. The celebration day's performers reflect that heritage: Sharde Thomas is the granddaughter of Otha Turner who founded the Rising Star band. The Como Mamas — Ester Wilbourn, Della Wright and Angela Taylor — are the granddaughters of Miles Pratcher, a musician who was part of the early 20th century hill blues genre, Pierotti said. Glen Faulkner is recognized for his incorporation of the diddley bow, a single-string child's instrument brought from Africa, into the hill country blues sound. Events leading into Friday's celebration include diddley bow making for children at the library after school on Wednesday and Thursday. The children will play their newly-made instruments at the celebration on Friday, Pierotti said. Hosts will include the Town of Como, the Como Civic Club and the Como Homemaker's Guild, Pierotti said. "It will give us another chance to celebrate extraordinary Panola countians and their accomplishments," the librarian said, "... another chance to be delighted by regional hill country music." Alan Lomax was a folklorist and musicologist who spent his lifetime collecting and celebrating music and musicians around the world, recording their songs, making photographs and films. His work is interwoven with the Library of Congress and the Archive of American Folk Song. During the 1950s and again in the 1970s, attracted by the lure of north Mississippi's unique Hill Country Blues, Lomax visited the Como area. The repatriation will place Lomax's recordings, photographs and film that captured this unique regional offshoot of the Delta Blues in the town's library. Likewise, photographs from the Hill Country Blues collection will be placed in the Como library. The JMH Foundation is a nonprofit organization created to focus public attention and help preserve the hill country blues music indigenous to North Mississippi, its web site states. Representing the Lomax Foundation will be John Lomax III, nephew of Alan Lomax, a Nashville-based journalist and music exporter. Representing the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation will be its founder and president, Olga Wilhelmine, blues performer, music historian and member of the Blues Foundation's board of directors. Article courtesy of The Polonian 10/11 WILLIAM STETSON KENNEDY (October 5, 1916-August 27, 2011) - AN APPRECIATION BY ANNA LOMAX WOODAs a child of seven, I remember Beluthahachee as an impenetrable tangle of trees and swamp with a packed earth clearing for the retired bus where Stetson Kennedy and his family were living when my mother came down to join his writer's colony in 1952. But Stetson knew how to coax the good and the beautiful from this morass. He pulled up stumps and cypress knees until a little lake formed, attracting kindred spirits, as well as wildlife that roosted on and under the house he built out over the water. Though slight and soft-spoken, Stetson tackled the problems of the South, of his South, with the same spirit - fearlessly, directly, and with optimism. He did it with his pen, with wit and wile, and through folklore. Like all the great Southern writers, Stetson was steeped in folklore, but while for some, folklore put the seal of fate in the status quo, Stetson saw it as a way to turn things around. While abhorring racism, Stetson understood and wrote about the plight of poor white folk, who had been the butt of writers from William Walker Percy to William Faulkner. These were attitudes he shared with my father, Alan Lomax, a close friend of seventy-odd years. During my father's final years, Stetson loyally made the drive to Tarpon Springs many times. At that point, Stetson couldn't hear and my father had aphasia. Yet the two if them would sit for hours, laughing and talking, hatching plans for cultural equity and the brotherhood of man. Stetson swore they understood one another perfectly. He talked about setting up a retirement home in the Keys for social thinkers and kindred spirits. That was Stetson - compassionate, loving, full of surprises, up for anything. I loved him, and I will miss him terribly, but will not say goodbye. Anna Lomax Wood, September 2011 04/11 REPATRIATION IN CINQUEFRONDI, CALABRIA
On August 1, 1954, Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella arrived in an impoverished village clinging to the foothills of the Aspromonte mountain range in the province of Reggio Calabria. There Lomax took 135 photographs and made 19 recordings, including several love songs in polyphony by a group of women. These, more than anything else, Lomax wrote, brought him back to the songs and people of the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s and forties. On April 21, 2011, the Association for Cultural Equity returned this documentation to the people of Cinquefrondi, to reside in the Mediateca Comunale "Pasquale Creazzo". The town band played, and the community, gathered at town hall. Goffredo Plastino, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Newcastle and curator of Lomax's Italian recordings, was present to represent the Lomax Archive with Anna Lomax Wood, who spoke to the assembly via Skype, they officially handed over the recordings and photographs to the community. The event triggered profound reflections about "the South" as it was in the 1950s, what had been lost and what gained in the interim, and the profound studies by ethnomusicologists, writers, and filmmakers of the poverty and the poetry of that era on the cusp of change. "Every photo and every song evoked discussions about names, relationships, and musical attitudes," said Dr. Plastino. "All the recordings have been followed by a burst of applause." One of the women who had been recorded in 1954, said, "I'd forgotten it all until I saw myself in that photo just now. How we suffered then!" A lengthy review article appeared in the Quotidiano della Calabria.
FIRST ALAN LOMAX FELLOWSHIP AWARDEDJudith Cohen received the first Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies from the Library of Congress's Kluge Center. Over the next four months in Washington, D.C., she will prepare for publication Lomax's 1952 fieldwork diary from Spain, a treasure trove of notes, photographs, local festival programs and other ephemera. Read More 2/11 HAITI OUTREACH DOCUMENTED IN NEW SITEThe Green Family Foundation (GFF) and Fastforward have launched a new website, This is Haiti, to document their work in Haiti over the past year. Music and film from Alan Lomax's field trip to Haiti have been used in their outreach to communities throughout the country. Visit This is Haiti12/10 ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI NOMINATED FOR GRAMMYSAlan Lomax In Haiti: Recordings For The Library Of Congress, 1936-1937, has been nominated for two Grammys: Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes. Congratulations to the whole Lomax in Haiti team and to Harte Recordings.
INTRODUCING GLOBAL JUKEBOX, AN INDEPENDENT MUSIC LABEL FROM THE ALAN LOMAX ARCHIVEThousands of hours of international field recordings housed in the Alan Lomax Archive will now reach audiences through Global Jukebox, the Archive's first independent music imprint. Find out more.05/10 "THE DAY WE FALL IS NOT THE DAY WE SINK"Cultural Repatriation in Haiti After the Quake By Gage Averill, SEM President In an odd twist of fate, my trip to Haiti in mid-January was postponed when the remote broadcast I was helping to set up from the Port-au-Prince Jazz Festival for CIUT-FM in Toronto fell apart. I was also intending to do preliminary legwork for the repatriation of the Alan Lomax in Haiti 1936-37 box set. The repatriation effort had garnered the support of the Green Family Foundation, based in Miami, and had become a Clinton Global Fund project for 2010. But fate intervened, the ground shook, and devastation ensued. In the agonizing weeks after January 12, amidst searches for friends, a long line of media interviews, commemorative events and the pure frantic busyness intended to counter the shock and anxiety, I had the chance to wonder what had become of the repatriation project. But each time this thought cropped up, I dismissed the project as trivial in comparison to the needs of the wounded and displaced. Yet the sight of monuments in ruins, galleries and museums reduced to rubble along with the visual arts inside them, and the loss of so many theatres, clubs, and music venues - to say nothing of the images on CNN of traumatized Haitians trying to sing through the pain of un-anesthetized amputations - continued to provoke around issues of culture and cultural loss. In the meantime, the Green Family Foundation set about making public service announcements with American and European celebrities (Sting, Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller, et al.) featuring the Lomax Haiti recordings as the soundtrack. The Green Foundation and Clinton Global sent sets out for fundraising events, for consciousness-raising, and for radio play in Haiti. Increasingly, these recordings from the 1930s became a media story of Haitian cultural richness and creativity, of cultural and political resilience, and of the need for cultural rebuilding in Haiti. And the Green Foundation began to rally the team that had worked on the Lomax project to get busy again on the Haiti repatriation project. And so we assembled together in Haiti in mid-April - old and new friends - to see what could be done. All the pictures and news footage didn't prepare me for the shock of non-recognition. Hillside neighborhoods in Canape-Vert no longer standing, fetid tent cities sprouting on every patch of vacant land, streets still impassable with rubble, and the town of Carrefour looking like Dresden after the bombing of WWII. Carrefour was an area where I played music with a band in an appliance store, studied drumming in a dense shantytown by the water's edge, and attended scores of concerts in nightclubs, and now people were living in tin shacks on the median strip of the National Highway #2 with diesel trucks roaring by on the dirt road amidst piles of garbage and debris everywhere.
We held a listening party, panel, and concert on our first full day in Haiti at the Cafe des Arts in Petionville, attended by musicians, scholars, ambassadors, government ministers, and people interested in the arts. Our team on the ground in the capital had been filming dancers and singers who remembered the songs and dances that Lomax had recorded, and the films brought tears to some eyes. My old friend, musician and radio personality Joel Widmaier, spoke of the need to take culture seriously in the rebuilding of the nation, to nurture it as a resource for survival. We headed out to the city of Leogane and its neighboring town of Carrefour Deux Forts, a coastal area to the West of Port-au-Prince, where a daughter of someone Lomax recorded had been located. PBS was filming our interviews with her and our visit to the former police station (now a rubble pile) where Alan Lomax had recorded rara bands in 1937. A center for rara (and Bizango and Kongo societies), Leogane and Carrefour des Forts had been a wonderful area in which to live while I was working with rara bands in the early 1990s. Now every third building was down, and it was believed that tens of thousands had perished in the area. Nevertheless, the markets were thriving and for those with homes intact, life appeared to have settled into a kind of fractured normalcy. A local Petwo and and a Rada Society held a dans (informal Vodou ceremony) for us lasting into the early nighttime. At the dans, we played a number of the songs from the region that had been recorded by Lomax, only to find many in the congregation singing along with the songs, another sign that this collection had resonance with a new generation. Interestingly, the night we left Leogane, we found out that one of our team may have located Francilia (last name unknown), a young singer that Alan had recorded, and whom I had made the subject of one of the albums in the box set. Now about 92 and a convert to Protestantism, she no longer sings Vodou songs. We hope to interview her on our next visit to Leogane and Carrefour Deux Forts. The Lomax Haiti archive, which includes some 1,500 audio recordings and six films, was the earliest major set of recordings to have been made in Haiti and it was of a size that dwarfs other more recent projects. What does it mean to have all of this suddenly available in this next century/millennium? What might its impact be in a country struggling to sustain its population and rebuild after the worst natural disaster in modern human history. In conversations formal and informal with members of ISPAN (Institute de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National), with the FOKAL cultural center (The Fondation Connaissance et Liberte / Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libete (FOKAL), with the Rector of the Universite de Quisqueya, and with cultural activists, NGOs, and government ministries, there was an overwhelming sense that the intangible cultural assets of Haiti, as recorded and documented by generations of local and foreign ethnographers, needed to be made available to the Haitian people and brought home (in some form or other) from repositories abroad. But the earthquake was a reminder of all of the hazards that face any repositories in Haiti. As in New Orleans, many important collections had been kept in individual homes. In recent decades, personal and institutional holdings had been subject to the everyday effects of a hot and alternately dry and wet climate, to hurricanes and flooding, to political violence and to crime, but now many lay crushed under roofs that had collapsed. The earthquake has given new urgency to the need to find a solution that combines easy access in Haiti with the safe storage of original audiovisual recordings in collections offshore. Digitalization has made this more feasible than ever. However, to locate the many collections held abroad, and to coordinate their repatriation to a network of cultural centers, libraries, and universities in Haiti will involve sustained work over a decade or more. It became clear over the course of this last visit to Haiti that the repatriation of the Lomax recordings is a piece of a much larger puzzle that will allow greater access to the history of Haiti's intangible cultural heritage. And access is about more than history - it's about the creative and expressive processes that allow people to make sense of themselves and their world; it's about being familiar enough with the past to use it as a resource for fashioning the future. A proverb used in a popular Haitian song came back to me in the days following the quake: "Jou-n tonbe se pa jou-n koala" (The day we fall is not the day we sink). We have plans for at least another couple of visits to Haiti to continue to retrace Alan Lomax's footsteps and to advance the repatriation project, but this will be only the start of a broader and more concerted effort to allow the far-flung diaspora of Haitian cultural assets to find their way home. an effort to allow the far-flung diaspora of Haitian cultural assets to find their way home. Gage Averill, 2010 Reprinted by permission from SEM Newsletter, May 2010, published by the Society for Ethnomusicology
ALAN LOMAX - THE MAN WHO RECORDED THE WORLDOn May 5, Yale University's John Szwed will present and discuss his upcoming biography of Alan Lomax for the Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, from 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm. The lecture will be at the Mary Pickford Theater, 3rd Floor, James Madison Building, The Library of Congress. From the Library of Congress: "It seems odd that no biography of Alan Lomax was written before now, especially given that many of the folk music performers whom Lomax discovered have had biographies of their own. True, Lomax was not a well known performer like Pete Seeger. He never held an academic post or a high government position, nor did he receive international or even national awards for his work until the very end of his life. But he was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, a man who changed how everyone heard music and even how they viewed America. When he died, newspaper and TV news reporters pointed out that he had been a musicologist, archivist, singer, DJ, filmmaker, photographer, author of 19 books, producer of dozens of radio, TV, video, and concert programs and hundreds of recordings, in addition to being the world's most famous folklorist. They might have added that he was also an anthropologist, political activist, lobbyist, and in his later years, something of a social theorist in the grand tradition of the nineteenth century. John F. Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies, Emeritus at Yale University. His work includes studies of Newfoundland, the Georgia Sea Islands, and Trinidad. A member of the Yale faculty since 1982, Professor Szwed has been Director of Graduate Studies in Anthropology and Acting Chair of African and African-American Studies. His research interests include creolization in the arts, folk music, and film noir. Szwed is also a musician and record producer and is President of Brilliant Corners, a non-profit music production company based in New York City. His recent publications include Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Soul (2005); Crossovers: Essays in Race, Music, and American Culture (2005); Doctor Jazz (2005), a book included with Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings with Alan Lomax (2005), for which he was awarded a 2005 Grammy; So What: The Life of Miles Davis (2004); and Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1998). He is currently Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University." Event listings at the Library of Congress
03/10 LISTENING PARTY SET FOR APRIL IN HAITIACE and Kimberly Green of the Green Family Foundation are proceeding with repatriation of the Alan Lomax in Haiti box set and full collection, which will likely be deposited at FOKAL in Port-au-Prince and the Digital Library of the Caribbean at Florida International University. A Listening Party focusing on the question of how best to disseminate the recordings and similar documents of traditional Haitian culture will be held with Haitian educators, librarians, and other stakeholders at in late April. Participants will include Monique Rocourt of ISPAN (Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National); Michelle Pierre Louis, Director of FOKAL, FastForward Haiti; representatives of Université Quisqueya; Kimberly Green of GFF; Gage Averill of the University of Toronto; Anna Lomax Wood of ACE. The group will be asked to critique trial lesson plans based on the box set, created for school children and translated into French. A Kréyol translation of the notes to the box set is being formatted for publication, and a French edition is underway. ACE and GFF are planning a series of video podcasts and a Memory Project on film to be made and distributed with FastForward.
"THE RECOVERY OF OUR GRENADIAN HERITAGE IS A PRIORITY!"In a meeting at ACE on January 12, Hon. Dessima Williams, Ambassador from Grenada to the U.N., said that her government is making the preservation and recovery of Grenadian cultural traditions a definite priority. Folklorist and musician Winston Fleary, a long-time cultural leader from Carriacou transplanted to New York, convened the meeting to plan preparations for the repatriation of Alan Lomax's 1962 recordings and photographs in Grenada and Carriacou. The Grenada-U.S. Committee for Cultural Equity and Repatriation was formed to raise funds and organize a series of performance lectures and workshops in the New York area and Grenada, leading up to the repatriation ceremonies in 2011. Also present was Juliana Clarke, an educator active in the New York Caribbean community, and Kent Lambert, accountant, who volunteered to manage the committee. Bobby Friedel and Taka Kawachi filmed the meeting. ACE's preservation, publishing, dissemination and repatriation of Caribbean cultural materials are a function of the fact that so much of the core culture of the Caribbean is orally based and transmitted. The digital revolution makes it possible for us to gather these resources and return them to repositories in their countries of origin as well as in the immigrant Diaspora. It is essential to broadcast that they are there and available and let people know what they are and why they are important. 10/09 INCARCERATION NATION: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE AMERICAN PRISON SYSTEMACE sponsored the October 19, 2009 benefit for the Legal Aid Justice Center, a non-profit legal-aid service center for low-income clients in the state of Virginia. 9/09 ACE REPATRIATION PROJECT SELECTED BY CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVEACE's Haiti Repatriation and Cultural Preservation Project was selected as an outstanding project of the Clinton Global Initiative in Haiti, sponsored by the Green Family Foundation, a humanitarian agency based in Miami and operating in Haiti, and a partner of the CGI. The project brings to light the recordings Alan Lomax made in Haiti for The Library of Congress from 1936 to 1937. Over the last ten years ACE, in collaboration with the Magic Shop in New York City and staff at the American Folklife Center, has had the recordings digitally transferred, restored, and denoised in order to return them to the Haitian people. Harte Recordings of San Francisco is publishing a box set of ten CDs with sound and video drawn from the collection, with extensive song notes and lyrics by Haitian music specialists, Gage Averill and Louis Carl St. Jean. It will include a book, compiled by Ellen Harold, of Lomax's fascinating Haitian diaries and his correspondence with his friend, Zora Neale Hurston; anthropologist, Melville Herskovits; and his mentor, Charles Seeger, as well as with the Library of Congress. Produced by Anna Wood, Jeffrey Greenberg, and David Katznelson, Alan Lomax in Haiti will be released in October/November 2009. To learn more visit The Haiti Box and Cultural Equity. Together with Kimberly Green and advisors from the Open Society Institute, we are exploring options for appropriate recipient institutions for the full collection. ACE's major concern is that the materials will be widely accessible to the public, to educational institutions, and other outlets, and we have outlined a possible program of dissemination and cultural feedback based on models in public folklore. We expect a formal repatriation ceremony to take place in Haiti next spring. Over the next few months, we will have the entire collection mastered before it is repatriated, and Gage Averill and his students will compile a digital catalog of the recordings. In its original form, the collection comprised 1,500 aluminum discs (over fifty hours) of recorded folk and popular music. It includes 350 ft. of 8mm film of music, dance, and ritual and over 250 pages of Alan Lomax's diaries, notes, and correspondence about his fieldwork in Haiti. Copies of the restored collection will be also be "repatriated" to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and deposited at the Schomburg Center for Research Center in Black Culture. Other key partners in this initiative include Harte Recordings, the Rock Foundation, the Concordia Foundation, the Lake Ray Foundation, and Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP. 9/09 ACE PRESENTS PAPER AT IASA 40th ANNUAL CONFERENCE IN ATHENS, GREECENathan Salsburg and Bertram Lyons presented the paper "Sharing Resources, Sharing Responsibility: Archives in the Digital Age" at the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives 40th Annual Conference in Athens, Greece. The paper was authored by Anna Lomax Wood, Nathan Salsburg and Bertram Lyons. 8/09 ACE CARIBBEAN REPATRIATION PROGRAM FEATURED AT SAA IN AUSTIN, TEXASACE's Archivist and Dissemination Coordinator, Bertram Lyons, represented ACE at the Society of American Archivists Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. Lyons, who chaired the session entitled, "Lest We Forget - Lest We Forget! Sustaining Memory in Postcolonial Archives", delivered the paper, "Sharing Resources, Sharing Responsibility, Sustaining Memory," highlighting ACE's efforts since 2005 to repatriate digital copies of Alan Lomax's Caribbean field recordings and photographs to local and regional repositories in the Caribbean. The session also included presentations by Gayle Williams of dLOC (the Digital LIbrary of the Caribbean) and Florida International University, and Helen Wong Smith of the University of Hawai'i, Hilo. For further information about the session and copies of the presentations, see session 506. 8/09 MISSISSIPPI BLUES TRAIL MARKER HONORS OTHA TURNEROn Saturday, August 29, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker was dedicated in downtown Como in honor of the late fife and drum musician Otha Turner. The ceremony included performances by Jimbo Mathus, Mark Massey, and the Rising Star Fife and Drum band, featuring Turner?s granddaughter Sharde Thomas on fife and vocals. This is the 82nd Mississippi Blues Trail marker to be dedicated since the first was unveiled in late 2006. A marker for Mississippi Fred McDowell was unveiled in Como on May 7, 2009. The marker, which was partially paid for with funds raised at the annual North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic in Potts Camp, was dedicated in tandem with the annual fife and drum picnic and goat roast held on Turner's property in nearby Gravel Springs. Turner (ca. 1908-2003) was the most famous exponent of the north Mississippi fife and drum tradition, which was first documented by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1942. Other local fife and drum performers noted on the marker include brothers Ed and Lonnie Young, Napolian Strickland, R.L. Boyce, Sid Hemphill, and his granddaughter Jessie Mae Hemphill. The Hemphill family is scheduled to receive their own marker in nearby Senatobia in the future. Although the local fife and drum tradition is often described as sounding "African," its origins likely stem from African American musicians transforming the Euro-American military fife and drum tradition with African and African-American musical influences. The local tradition is thought to have started shortly after the Civil War. Unlike the military groups, the north Mississippi fife and drum bands played mostly at social events, often picnics held around the 4th of July and Labor Day. The groups? repertoires included spirituals, instrumentals, minstrel songs, and blues, such as "Sitting On Top of the World" and "My Babe." Otha Turner (his name is sometimes spelled Othar or Other) was born in Rankin County, but moved as a small child to north Mississippi. He received his first fife from a neighbor as a boy, and was soon making his own instruments, using a heated metal rod to bore out a piece of cane and create mouth and finger holes. Turner worked as a farmer for most of his life, and for many years hosted annual fife and drum picnics and goat roasts on his property in Gravel Springs. For many years he played drums together with fife player Napolian Strickland, and later formed his own group, which featured members of his family including his daughter Bernice Turner Pratcher and granddaughter Sharde Thomas. Turner was first recorded in the late ?60s and in the 1990s recorded two CDs under his own name, Everybody Hollerin? Goat and Otha Turner and the Afrossippi Allstars, both of which were produced by Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. In the 1970s, Turner was profiled in the documentaries "Gravel Springs Fife and Drum" and "The Land Where the Blues Began," and he later became a regular performer at events including the Delta Blues Festival and the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival. In 2003, Turner was featured in the Martin Scorsese blues film Feel Like Going Home, and his music was also used in Scorsese?s film Gangs of New York. Upon Turner's death in 2003 his then thirteen-year-old granddaughter and protege Sharde Thomas took over leadership of his Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. For more information about the Mississippi Blues Trail please visit msbluestrail.org. -courtesy Mississippi Blues Commission 6/09 ACE REPATRIATION PROJECT FEATURED AT CSA IN KINGSTON, JAMAICAACE's Archivist and Dissemination Coordinator, Bertram Lyons, delivered a paper at this year's CSA conference in Kingston, Jamaica highlighting ACE's efforts since 2005 to repatriate digital copies of Alan Lomax's Caribbean field recordings and photographs to local and regional repositories in the Caribbean. The panel, "Archives--Repatriating Caribbean Music Recordings," which included Stephen Steumpfle (Society for Ethnomusicology), Elizabeth Watson (University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados), Claudia de Four (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad), Maureen Webster-Prince (National Library of Jamaica), and Rosita M. Sands (Columbia College, Chicago), addressed repatriation needs and initiatives regarding cultural heritage resources in Caribbean collecting institutions. 5/09 RESCUING PERFORMANCE STYLE DATASETSDesigned by ACE Archivist and Project Manager, Bertram Lyons, ACE launched a 3-month project to decode seven migrated digital datasets from Alan Lomax's Performance Style Research. The project is flourishing under the assistance of Mary Haberle, who is an MLIS student at McGill University, where she specializes in Archival Studies. Her interest in working with digital archives led her to a practicum with ACE this summer. Prior to beginning graduate school, she spent several years working in non-profit and advocacy organizations in New York City. Mary was awarded a Joint Honors Bachelor's degree in History and Religious Studies from McGill University in 2003. WINTER 12/08 DIGITAL HERITAGE REPATRIATION WORKSHOP IN S. AFRICABertram Lyons represented ACE in South Africa at the Digital Heritage Repatriation Workshop held at the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University, December 9-12, 2008, a collaboration between the University of Michigan African Studies Center, ILAM and the University of Ghana. The purpose of the workshop was to draft guidelines for the "Use, Sale and Reproduction of Digital Heritage" and "Repatriation of Digital Heritage" for African memory repositories. Lyons presented a paper on ACE's Caribbean digital repatriation project as a model for the dissemination of digital cultural heritage. The resulting guidelines will be published by ILAM and the University of Michigan. WINTER 2008-09 JFR TO PUBLISH LOMAX SYMPOSIUM PAPERSPapers from the symposium, The Lomax Legacy: Folklore in a Globalizing Century, given by the American Folklife Center and ACE at the Library of Congress in January 2006, are being published in a special issue of The Journal of Folklore Research. Contributors include Robert Baron, Judith Cohen, William Ferris, Todd Harvey, John Szwed, Bill Westerman, and Anna Wood. 11/2008 1950s ITALIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOS PUBLISHED On November 16, 2008 Il Saggiatore (Milan) published a book of ethnographic photos made by Alan Lomax
during his 1954-55 fieldwork in Italy. Edited by Goffredo Plastino, the book is entitled L'anno più felice della mia vita (The Happiest Year of My Life) and contains over 120 photographs selected from
a collection of 1700-plus. The images are accompanied by excerpts from Lomax's notebooks and correspondence
and from a radio series on Italian folk music produced by Lomax for the BBC. 09/2008 ACE DISSEMINATION PROGRAM FEATURED AT IASA IN SIDNEYBertram Lyons will give a paper on ACE's efforts to disseminate its collections to regional archives and to repatriate collections made in other countries at the IASA conference in Sidney, Australia, September 13-19. This year's conference theme : Interconnection and cooperation between individuals and institutions active in the field of sound and audiovisual collections - corresponds to ACE's emphasis on cultural feedback and resource dissemination. Lyons' talk will highlight the progress of ACE's Caribbean repatriation effort. The program began in 2005 in collaboration with the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago in order to furnish audiovisual documentation made by Alan Lomax in a number of Caribbean nations to key repositories in those countries in the form of high quality digital copies. The 2008 conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) is hosted by the Australasian Sound Recordings Association (ASRA) at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, Australia. FALL/2008 CHOREOMETRICS FILMS ON DVDMedia Generation is publishing Rhythms of Earth, a DVD edition of four remastered Choreometrics films by Alan Lomax and Forrestine Paulay exploring relationships between movement style and culture. The DVD includes a short feature on the Global Jukebox, an interview on Choreometrics by filmmaker Robert Gardiner with Alan Lomax, and a film by John Bishop about the concepts and methods of Choreometrics and Performance Style research interviewing Forrestine Paulay, Michael Del Rio, and Michael Flory. Related articles by Lomax, Bishop and Wood in PDF format can be downloaded. The DVD was authored by John Bishop. 08/2008 NEW CIVIL RIGHTS SONGBOOK BY GUY AND CANDIE CARAWANSing For Freedom: The Story of The Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs has been hailed by Coretta Scott King as, "a major contribution to our heritage
that should be read and treasured by freedom and justice-loving people everywhere." Harry Belafonte has praised it as: "More than a songbook, this collection
places the important repertoire of civil rights songs in historical perspective with photographs, interviews, and oral histories of activists." 08/2008 "SCUOLA LOMAX" FOUNDED IN CATANIAThe Alan Lomax Cultural Association opened with festivities on September 22, 2004 in Catania, Sicily. Its founders are musician Francesco De Francisco and his
brother Giuseppe, a philosopher, and their associates, Stefano Sciotto (also a philosopher) and Gianluca Maugeri (a master whistler!). Their purpose is to support
and teach Sicilian folk music, gathering together little known folk musicians and visual artists scattered around the island and with them to form a school of folk
traditions. The following is from a press release put out by the association: 07/2008 BARTON IS CURATOR OF RECORDED SOUND AT LIBRARY OF CONGRESSMatthew Barton has been named Curator of Recorded Sound in the Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. He had previously worked with original Library of Congress field recordings for the American Folklife Center. Barton has an extensive background in recorded sound and film, in rare and historical recorded collections, and the technologies that produced them and that are required for their preservation. He worked as an assistant to Alan Lomax in the 1980s, and in the 1990s as production coordinator of the Alan Lomax Collection CD series on Rounder Records, to which he also contributed editorially. Barton is also an authority on early field collecting in the United States His published writings include essays in Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 (NY: Routledge, 2003) and contributions to Western Folklore and numerous other professional journals. He works at the new media facilities of the Library at Culpepper, Virginia. 06/2008 LOMAX'S 1952 SPANISH RECORDINGS REVIEWED"Una caza canciones en la España de los '50" (A Song Hunter in 1950s Spain) is the title of an extensive review of Alan Lomax's work in Spain and the film and CDs that have come out of it. It appears in La Revista (June 19), a Spanish print and online journal of culture. Download the article (.pdf) 04/2008 NYS FOLK ARTS ROUNDTABLE AND MAFA AT COOPERSTOWNThe NYS Folk Arts Roundtable was held jointly with the Mid-Atlantic Folklife Association this year at Cooperstown, NY. In a fascinating keynote address Steve Zeitlin and Amanda Dargan talked about the various Latino and Caribbean manifestations of song dueling. The focus of the meeting was on archives, featuring presentations on planning and implementing digitization projects; law and ethics relating to archives; the major collections of the New York State Historical Archives; and how archival collections are being made more widely accessible through the web and other methods. Anna Wood gave a presentation about the ACE website. 02/2008 SPEAKING TOUR OF BALTICAnna Lomax Wood of ACE and Todd Harvey of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress gave presentations on the blues in four Baltic
countries in honor of Black History month. The speaking tour was a program of the U.S. Department of State and was sponsored by the American Embassies
in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in partnership with local universities and cultural institutions. The multi-media presentation, entitled
"Seeking the Roots: the Lomax Legacy," explored the development of early blues and related genres through the work of Texas folklorists John and Alan
Lomax, who were among the pioneers in collecting and disseminating African American and Afro-Caribbean folk song. 12/2007 GIDEON D'ARCANGELO JOINS ACE BOARDThe Board of Directors of ACE welcomes Gideon D'Arcangelo, an interactive media designer, teacher, and radio producer. A partner in ESI Design in
New York City, D'Arcangelo's recent projects include the World Hunger Action Center for Mercy Corps (opening September 2008), the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame Visitor Experience Redesign (launching March 2009), the Children's Museum of Los Angeles (opening March 2009), and the Reuters Sign at Three
Times Square (2001). He is creator/producer of "Listening In" radio series on "Weekend America", which explores the ways we use music in everyday life
(http://listeningin.org). He has been teaching multimedia design in the Graduate Interactive
Telecommunications Program of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. 11/2007 MUSICAL AND GENETIC AFFILIATIONS IN AFRICAA paper on the co-evolution of musical styles and genetic change in sub-Saharan African populations was read by Floyd Reed (U. of Maryland) at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Society on Nov. 23, 2007. Coauthored by Reed and Sarah Tishkoff (Dept. of Biology, U. Maryland), Victor Grauer, and Anna Wood (ACE), the study draws upon a genetic database of samples from 84 ethnolinguistic populations in Africa and song samples from 181 African cultural groups, both within large worldwide samples. It compares the two datasets in order to make inferences about African population history, applying a variety of statistical and analytic techniques to both. The paper is being expanded for publication. 09/2007 HALLY WOOD TRIBUTE AT LIVING ROOMA tribute to the late folk singer, Hally Wood, was held at the Living Room in Manhattan's lower East Side on September 30. Sharing songs and memories were
folk music legends Jean Ritchie, Oscar Brand, John Cohen, Jerry Epstein, Joe Hickerson, and Robin Roberts. Frank Davis from Houston, a discovery of Hally Wood's,
played "the big daddy" a banjo-type instrument he constructed from a snare drum and a guitar neck. Present as well were Hally Wood's nieces, Annabelle Lee and
her daughter Irene, who sang "The Wild Ox Moan," "Oh, Daddy be Gay," "Worried Blues," and "The Cuckoo," which were among the folk singer's favorites. 09/2007 ACE AND IMPERIAL COLLEGE TO COLLABORATEACE and Imperial College, London, will collaborate on performance style research. Armand Leroi, Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial and Anna Wood of ACE, will direct the research. As a first step biostatistician Jonathan Swire designed a cluster analysis of the Cantometrics dataset largely confirming the factored geography of song styles carried out by Alan Lomax and his associates in the 1960s. 09/2007 EMMY NOMINATION: LOMAX THE SONGHUNTERLomax the Songhunter (2004), produced by Joost Verhey for MM Filmprodukties in co-production with Netherland Programmes Service, was nominated for an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming. The News & Documentary Emmy Awards ceremony took place on September 24, 2007 at the Sheraton New York Hotels and Towers in New York City. The theme of the 93-minute documentary is Alan Lomax's devotion to recording folk songs before they were subsumed by the modern music industry. When visited by director Rogier Kappers in 2001, Lomax could no longer speak due to a stroke. Lomax is portrayed through the commentary of family, friends and colleagues, and Kappers retraces (in an identical van) his journeys in Scotland, Spain, and Italy made decades before. On a remote Hebridean island Kappers meets Flora MacNeil, who knows almost four hundred songs by heart. And upon hearing the recordings Lomax made of them in 1952, people in a small Spanish village bring out their bagpipe once again and burst into song. The documentary has won several awards and was aired on the PBS series, POV, in 2006. 8/2007 ACE AWARDED NEH CHAIRMAN'S GRANTThe National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a Chairman's Grant to ACE so that nine datasets produced by Alan Lomax's performance style and culture research
could be extracted from obsolete drives and migrated into modern database formats. The datasets comprise coded analyses of recorded examples of music, dance, work movement
and speech, as well as coded ethnographic data. They contain the basic data for several interrelated studies of performance style, including Choreometrics,
Parlametrics, Phonotactics, and studies of voice qualities, folk song texts, instruments and orchestration, minutage, and American popular song, as well as
sub-studies linking song and cultural variables. 07/2008 PERFORMANCE STYLE & CULTURE RESEARCH AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESSThe Performance Style & Culture Research Collection, consisting of more than 200 document boxes and hundreds of computer punch cards and mainframe printouts, was shipped to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress this month. Archivist Nancy Johnson spent over two and a half years at ACE organizing and annotating the massive body of materials documenting the research on expressive style performed by Alan Lomax and his collaborators from the mid-1950s through the mid-1990s. A detailed Finding Aid accompanies the collection. This work was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Concordia Foundation, and the Rock Foundation. SUMMER/2007 MATTHEW BARTON HAS LAST WORD IN 'LOST DELTA'A sham controversy stirred up by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov to cull notoriety for their book, Lost Delta Found, has been definitively sorted out in a scholarly and sobering review article by Matthew Barton, appearing in Western Folklore (Summer 2007). While he applauds the publication of John Work's unfinished report on the Coahoma County study, Barton catalogs a long list of omissions, instances of poor scholarship, and misleading but unsupported assertions about Alan Lomax's relationship with Work on the part of the authors. Barton has been employed for several years at the Library of Congress, where most of the Fisk/Lomax/Work correspondence concerning the project resides. Download the article (.pdf) 07/2007 ACE/CBMR REPATRIATE FRENCH ANTILLES RECORDINGSACE and the Center for Black Music Research jointly presented the recordings, photographs, and notes made by Alan Lomax in the French Antilles in 1962 to
the Conseil Général de la Guadeloupe on July 9, 2007. The materials had been collected in Dominica, Martinique, St. Barthelemy, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia
in June and July 1962. The official repository of the 30 hours of digitized sound recordings, 300 images, and one linear foot of photocopied manuscripts
and correspondence is the Mediathéque Caraibe, a multimedia library devoted to the Caribbean, located in Basse Terre. The Mediathéque's extensive holdings
and excellent staff and facilities make it a key resource for the entire Caribbean region. 06/2007 RESERVISTS AT ACEACE welcomes two new employees, Susan Tobin and Peter Stone, who come to us from ReServe a New York City organization that matches the résumés and specific interests of retirees with part-time jobs that answer the special needs of employers in the nonprofit sector. Susan and Peter each bring extensive professional expertise to their work at ACE, Susan as an archivist and historian, Peter as a professional writer about music. Read their comments. SPRING 2007 ACE WELCOMES NEW BOARD MEMBERSACE welcomes four distinguished individuals to its Board of Directors: William R. Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and Senior Associate Director Center for the Study of the American South at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; entertainment attorney Jeffrey A. Greenberg who is a partner at Beldock, Levine & Hoffman, LLP (New York City); Daniel Sheehy, Curator & Director, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings/Global Sound (Smithsonian Institution); and the ethnomusicologist and noted Indonesia specialist, Philip Yampolsky (Founder and Director, Center for World Music, University of Illinois). Samuel Floyd, founder of the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, has agreed to serve as an advisory board member. 2007 and 2008 NEW EDITIONS OF LOMAX / BISHOP / PAULAY FILMSAmerican Patchwork, Alan Lomax's award-winning PBS television series documenting regional American folk traditions; Oss Oss Wee Oss, four films on the Padstow
May Day celebrations in Cornwall; and the Choreometrics series Rhythms of Earth, are being made available on DVD through Media Generation. 03/2007 HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING: A SEEGER FAMILY TRIBUTEOn March 15–16, 2007, a celebration of the Seeger family's contribution to American folk music was held at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D. C.,
co-sponsored by the American Folklife Center and the Music Divisions of the Library. The event began with a screening of highlights from the Pete and Toshi
Seeger Film Collection, now housed at the Library. Neil Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus of Memorial University of Newfoundland, gave the keynote address of
the March 16 symposium, which featured presentations on and by several generations of Seegers. Speaking were Betty Auman; Taylor Aitken Greer; Judith Tick;
Peggy Seeger; Michael Taft; Todd Harvey; David Dunaway; Mike Seeger; Ray Allen; Robert Cantwell; Anthony Seeger; James Durst; Joe Hickerson; Bill Ivey;
Millie Rahn; and Jeff Place. A concert at the Coolidge Auditorium on Friday evening with Mike, Peggy, and Pete Seeger performing with friends and family
capped the event. Despite an ice storm, the audience was packed. 2006 JELLY ROLL MORTON RECORDINGS AWARDED PRIX CHARLES GROSParis. In its 59th Palmaré the Academie Charles Cros awarded the Lomax Archive the Prix Charles Cros for historical and editorial work on The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. The Prix Charles Cros is the most distinguished musical award in France. In 2002 the Academie Charles Cros honored Alan Lomax for his life's work, describing him in these words: Grande figure du collectage phonographique des musiques populaires aux Etats Unis, en Amérique du Sud et en Europe. 12/2006 RECORDINGS AND PHOTOS PRESENTED IN THE BALEARICSTwo annotated CDs of Alan Lomax's Balaearic recordings, and a volume of Lomax's Balearic photographs, were ceremoniously presented in Mallorca, Ibiza,
and Formentera in December by Anna Wood, Judith Cohen, Esperança Bonet, and Rosa Vallés. The CDs Ibiza & Formentera (edited by Judith Cohen and Esperança Bonet)
and Mallorca (edited by Manel Frau), and the book of photographs, Mirades / Glances (edited by Anonti Pizà with essays by Manel Frau, Judith Cohen, Esperança Bonet,
and Rosa Vallés) were presented on in Mallorca on December 12 by Fundacio Sa Nostra, which also published Mirades. On December 13 a similar presentation was made
in Ibiza by the Consell Insular of Ibiza and Formentera followed by a reception hosted by Sa Nostra Ibiza. In Formentera, the Ibiza & Formentera CD was
presented at the Town Hall on December 16, and Mirades by Sa Nostra Formentera on December 19. Several of the original artists were present on these
occasions to share their recollections of recording with Alan Lomax. 12/06 VICTOR GRAUER'S "ECHOES OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS" IN PRINT"Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors," Victor Grauer's monograph applying Cantometrics theory to the "out-of-Africa model in population genetics was published in the 2/2006 issue of The World of Music.Drawing upon his early work on with Alan Lomax on the Cantometrics project, supplemented by his own ideas, Grauer attempts to show how recent work in genetics could lead to an understanding of human history through music. In his earliest writings on folk song style in 1956, Alan Lomax conjectured that Pigmy and Bushman style represented mankind's earliest music. Subsequent research over two and a half decades confirmed this hypothesis, tracing the "integrated" style of early Africans through South and Southeast Asia, and into the Caucuses, from whence it seems to have spread to Southeastern and Central Europe and Russia - where it remained in pockets until the age of sound recording. 07/20-23 6TH ANNUAL ISOLA CONFERENCE TO HONOR JACOB D. ELDER The International Society for Oral Literature in Africa (ISOLA), based in Binghamton, N.Y., will be holding its sixth
annual African Diaspora Conference on Oral Literature at the University of Trinidad and Tobago at St. Augustine.
The locale and topic of the conference: Oral Literature and Identity Formation in Africa and the Diaspora, were selected
to honor of pioneering work of folklorist Jacob D. Elder and to celebrate his life and achievements. In the words of the Society: 06/18 ACE DEPOSITS HISTORIC RECODRINGS AT FOLK RESEARCH CENTRE IN ST. LUCIA In a ceremony held on June 18, 2006, at the Folk Research Centre (FRC) in St. Lucia, Jeffrey Greenberg, representing the Association for Cultural Equity,
and Rosita Sands, of the Center for Black Music Research, made a presentation of recordings and photos made by Alan Lomax in St. Lucia in 1962.
The material, presented on a hard drive with an accompanying digital catalog, will reside at the FRC, whose director is Kennedy Samuel. 06/15 PETER KENNEDY HAS DIED It is with tremendous sadness that we note the death of esteemed British folklorist Peter Kennedy (b. 1922) on June 10, 2006, at the age of 84. As a member of the famous
"Singing Kennedy" family of Scotland, Peter's connections to folk music performance and scholarship reached back into the nineteenth century. His mother Helen and her
sister Maud Karpeles had been instrumental in founding the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which Douglas Kennedy, Peter's father, headed until 1961. 06/02-07/06/2006 FOLK: AN EXHIBITION AND PERFORMANCE SERIES
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