Happy Birthday Alan Lomax!

"...Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the South,  Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond...

... Long before the Internet existed, he envisioned a “global jukebox” to disseminate and analyze the material he had gathered during decades of fieldwork. A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads. ..." 

See article in The New York Times: Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital.

Further news about this Global Jukebox see news at Cultural Equity.

Thanks to Johan Jacobsson.

Song of the kolkhoz of Borets

Chorus of the Russian song of the kolkhoz of "Borets" [Bronnitskogo] region of Moscow

Schalmeienkapelle Rossow

While doing research for a fb-friend on the name of this instrument I found this. Appearently these are called schalmei:


update 12-8-2011:
Looking as if it could usher in the Last Judgment, this musical instrument actually plays a rather amiable part in the history of the GDR. Schalmei (shall-my) bands were formed in factories, communities, schools and paramilitary garrisons, and they also competed under the auspices of the FDJ on the regional and national level. If there is a contemporary heartland for the Schalmei since the Wende, it is the region of former East Germany called “Vogtland”, in the southwest corner of Thuringia near Plauen or Gera where the Schalmei tradition is still very much alive in smaller towns.

In any other context, the “Schalmei” (French chalumai, English shawm) is a completely different instrument: a woodwind forerunner of the modern oboe tracing back to the Middle Ages. How the name came to be applied to two such unrelated instruments is not clear, but this otherworldly German cousin to the military bugle is also called a Martin’s Trumpet (named for the inventor Max Martin who is also remembered for the tü-ta tü-ta still used as a horn on emergency vehicles in Germany). Where this novel instrument initially caught on was in the Saarland, that disputed coal-mining territory (Think: World War I) on the French border. Roving Schalmei bands made up of unemployed war veterans in the 1920s accompanied their socialist songs with instruments of different sizes and registers. Erich Honecker’s father is known to have played in a Schalmei band when Erich (born 1912) was a small child.

Because of this leftist ancestry, the Schalmei was a natural for adoption in the GDR. The Wende Museum now owns five of them, small, medium and large. Volunteers? The stentorian outdoor sound of a Schalmei orchestra is not quite like anything else.

source: http://wendemuseum.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/a-sound-like-no-other-the-schalmei/

Seattle Folklore Society's video tapes from the 1960s

"In the late 1960's, the Seattle Folklore Society and KCTS public television video taped various acts that came through town."

Check out Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Jesse Fuller, Bukka White, Big Joe Williams, Doc Watson, Elizabeth Cotton, Fred McDowell, Fred McFalls and Bren Byson, Furry Lewis, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Mike Russo, Mike Seeger, Roscoe Holcomb, Roy Caudill, Son House and embedded here Rev. Gary Davis and Buell Casey.



Part 2 of the Rev. Gary Davis video can be found here.



Part 2 of the Buell Casey video can be found here.

If you enjoy watching footage of legends of blues and folk blues as much as I do you should head on over to FolkSeattle's Channel immediately.

St. Martin

On the evening of November 11th in some places in Holland (in more and more under commercial pressure), the Dutch speaking part of Belgium and most areas of Germany and Austria, children are walking from house to house with paper lanterns and candles, and are singing songs about St. Martin in return for treats.
I caught some on tape in Zwolle. The background choir is done by my two dash hounds.

listen

Seal Djiril's Hymn

"... A series of songs and recitations, many of them based loosely around Cape Breton folklore. Selkies abound. The centerpiece is the beyond- abstruce story-song "Hadkenek: The Snow that Comes." ..."
Gordon Bok's "Seal Djiril's Hymn" available thanks to Time Has Told Me.