Alan Lomax in Cabrales

Alan Lomax's recordings in Cabrales.

Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. During the New Deal, with his father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture. With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore,[3] even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 80s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South (source: Wikipedia).

Between 1952 and 1953 he traveled for six months Spain recording a récopilation of folk music, which been born under the shape of 14 albums, crossing to Cabrales 12 of November, 1952.

Gerineldo, singing by Carmen Prieto in Arenas (youtube).



Table of contents of the recordings (hosted in culturalequity.org).


Corri-Corri - Romance de la Virgen y el pastor.

Para empezar a cantar.

Da la vuelta, majo.

Ea, ea, ea, ea.

Después que la han comido - La buena pro.

Gerineldo.

Mambrón se fue a la guerra.

Sevillano es Manuel.

Santa María si a ti te quiere tu madre - Santa María.

La cabraliega.

Soy pastor y nací en el monte.

Caminito de la fuente (I).

Caminito de la fuente (II).

Este niño tiene sueño - Mázate vejigu - San José es carpintero.

Y arriba, que arriba que va - Hoguera.

Dicen que los pastores.


Related:

Photos of Alan Lomax in Cabrales.

Alan Lomax in Asturias (pdf).



www.concejodecabrales.com

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