Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of American Folksong in the 1930s

FAIN: DR-272401-20

Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)
Sara Cohen (Project Director: February 2020 to August 2022)

To make Jonathon W. Stones book, Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of Folksong in the 1930s, available Open Access on our digital publishing platform Fulcrum.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of American Folksong in the 1930s
Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780472902446
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Author: Jonathan W. Stone
Abstract: In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the "American Negro" in several southern African American prisons. Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes' field recordings—including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton—contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element—a sonic rhetoric—for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power of folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes' archive and other repositories of historicized sound.
Primary URL: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/v405sc60h
Primary URL Description: Open Access eBook of Listening to the Lomax Archive
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/51246
Secondary URL Description: Listening to the Lomax Archive in OAOpen
Type: Single author monograph

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