Shirley Collins on Alan Lomax
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The prolific and most significant of American song-hunters - Alan Lomax - is the choice of English folk singer Shirley Collins.
She's joined by singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg.
Lomax did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience. He was the first to record towering figures like Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie. He was instrumental in the revival of U.S. and UK folk.
Shirley Collins met Lomax in 1954, after he'd moved to England to avoid the U.S. McCarthy witch-hunt. She tells the story of how they fell in love and describes their recording trips around Europe and in America's Deep South, on the cusp of the civil rights movement.
Lomax's ambition was to give a voice to the voiceless, and that took him from fisherman shacks to prisons, farmyards to cotton mills. His steadfast drive to capture cultures before they disappeared resulted in a staggering amount of recordings we can listen to today, from gospel choirs to Cajun fiddling, country blues to calypsos and Haitian voodoo rituals.
Presenter: Matthew Parris.
Producer: Eliza Lomas
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2019.
Transcript
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| 0:36.6 | Picture the scene, 1933, a state prison in Louisiana. |
| 0:41.5 | A young man named Alan Lomax and his father John have lugged an aluminium |
| 0:46.3 | sound recorder to collect folk songs from inside the prison. A convicted murderer walks up to the microphone, a powerfully built man who goes by the name of Led Belly. |
| 0:57.0 | When he sings his voice is unforgettable |
| 1:07.7 | Clear trumpet-like and his hands are like two birds flying over his 12-string guitar. The Lomaxes take Lead Bellies remarkable |
| 1:17.1 | recording to the Louisiana Governor and not long after Lead Bell is pardoned and released. |
| 1:24.4 | Alan Lomax was one of the most significant and prolific American song hunters of the 20th century |
| 1:30.6 | and is today's great life. Proposing him is English traditional folk singer Shirley Collins who joins me in the studio. |
| 1:39.0 | Shirley, why have you nominated Alan Lomax? |
| 1:42.0 | Because he's a great man for a start and Why have you nominated Alan Lomax? |
| 1:42.7 | Because he's a great man for a start and he's an original man. |
| 1:46.9 | He is responsible for giving a voice to voiceless people. |
| 1:51.3 | That is people who always sang, always kept on the songs that they had learned from their |
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