The Song Hunter: How Alan Lomax saved the sounds of America

Twenty Thousand Hertz

Dallas Taylor

Design, Music, Music Commentary, Arts

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alan Lomax believed that the culture of poor Americans was important and worthy of saving. So he spent decades traveling the American South and recording obscure musicians on their front porches, in churches, even in prisons. Today, he's considered an American icon, but the road to becoming a legend wasn't an easy one. Featuring Southern Historical Collection archivist Chaitra Powell, American Folklife Center curator Todd Harvey, and filmmaker Rogier Kappers. Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by Defacto Sound. Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see our video series. If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠mystery.20k.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Support the show and get ad-free episodes at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠20k.org/plus⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow Dallas on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠Facebook⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Join our community on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Reddit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Discover more at lexus.com/curiosity. Archival recordings in this episode came from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity. Check out Rogier's documentary "Lomax the Songhunter" on Amazon. For more information on the crowdsourcing project for transcribing Alan Lomax's notes, visit https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/alan-lomax/ Subscribe to The Wind where ever you get your podcasts. Episode transcript, music, and credits can be found here: https://www.20k.org/episodes/soundsworthsaving Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's a new year and many of us are committing to exercising and eating healthier.
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0:19.7	That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com slash H-E-R-T-Z.
0:24.1	Zocococ.com slash Hertz.
0:30.5	You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.
0:39.3	Where do you go to find out about yourself?
0:42.4	Where do you go to find out about your community?
0:44.9	This is Shaitra Powell.
0:46.8	And if you say, I talk to my grandmother, or I go to the barbershop and ask a question,
0:54.5	and then you ask yourself, like, okay, so that knowledge that I'm gaining,
0:59.1	where is that preserve?
1:00.8	How do you make that available for future generations?
1:05.7	Shaitra is the African American Collections and Outreach Archivist
1:09.4	for an archive called the Southern
1:11.0	Historical Collection. And so, like at family gatherings, how I try to explain what it is I do is
1:17.8	I try to think of ourselves as memory keepers and the centralized place where you go to find out
1:23.7	about fill in the blank.
1:37.4	When you imagine archives, you might think of cabinets full of documents, but culture goes so far beyond just written words.
1:46.3	A lot of archives are built based on words on paper, and not every community writes words on papers to tell their story.
1:50.3	And so can we think about oral history or sound?
	...

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