Southern Journey

In 1958, Lomax had returned to America after a decade recording the traditional music of Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; producing radio and television series for the BBC; and compiling the eighteen-volume World Library of Folk and Primitive Music for Columbia Records.^[7] His voluntary exile had been in no small part prompted by the inception of the McCarthy witch hunts, which had a particular hunger for Lomax’s folk-music peers.^[8]

On his return to New York City following the death of McCarthy in 1957, he found an urban folk revival in full bloom. Crowds of young banjo players, guitarists, fiddlers, and fans were gathering in Washington Square Park to pick and sing traditional songs and tunes, many of which Lomax had recorded years earlier from musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Hobart Smith, and Texas Gladden. The revival was to some extent driven by access to these earlier recordings at Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, where they had access to hundreds of songs in albums, books (among them Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs and Our Singing Country), and burgeoning folk-music magazines such as Sing Out!.^[9] Lomax himself was somewhat sceptical about the burgeoning scene he encountered, and on some level it proved to be the catalyst for the Southern Journey collecting trips. He commented 40 years later:

Some of the young folkniks, who dominated the New York scene, asserted that there was more folk music in Washington Square on Sunday afternoon than there was in all rural America. Apparently, it made them feel like heroes to believe that they were keeping a dying tradition alive. The idea that these nice young people, who were only just beginning to learn how to play and sing in good style, might replace the glories of the real thing, frankly horrified me. I resolved to prove them wrong."

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Lomax began making arrangements for a field recording trip throughout the American South using a prototype Ampex 600 Series stereo recorder. He secured support from Ahmet Ertegun and Nesuhi Ertegun, of Atlantic Records. Lomax was accompanied by the young British folksinger Shirley Collins, whom he had met in London several years earlier. They had begun a relationship before Lomax moved back to New York, and with the trip impending, he invited her to accompany him to act as his assistant. They left New York City in a Buick Roadmaster in late August 1959.

Recording started on August 24 in Bluefield, Virginia, where the pair recorded an old subject of Lomax's, the banjo virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Hobart Smith. For the next two months the pair traveled through Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, making over 70 hours of recordings. The project was shorter than every other major recording trip of Lomax's career. It marked the first stereo recordings made of American traditional music in the field, at last doing justice to the sonic complexity of the Georgia Sea Island ring shouts, the many-voiced work songs of the Southern prison farms, and the thunderous hymnody of the Sacred Harp. But perhaps its greatest achievement was the discovery of farmer and bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell.

in 1960, Lomax was invited to Williamsburg, Virginia, to serve as music supervisor to a historical film being produced by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He used the occasion to do a follow-up tour of coastal Virginia and Georgia, recording again with many of the artists from the 1959 trip, as well as several new artists. Lomax and Collins had split up by this time, and she had returned to England, where two albums worth of material recorded by Lomax and Peter Kennedy before the Southern Journey had recently been released. Lomax was instead accompanied on the 1960 trip by his young daughter, Anna Lomax, who would later go on to found the Association for Cultural Equity.

When Lomax returned to New York City in late October 1959, he prepared seven albums for Atlantic, which were released as the "Southern Folk Heritage Series".^[10] There was much music left over, however, and Lomax ultimately made an arrangement with Prestige Records to issue another series entirely – twelve album volumes under the title "Southern Journey".^[11] This latter series featured the new recordings made by Lomax and his daughter Anna in 1960.

Numerous other issues and reissues of material from the recordings includes:

• In 1971, German record label GHP released a solo imprint of the Mountain Ramblers recordings made in Hillsville, Virginia.
• In 1977, New World Records undertook a major re-release of the Southern Journey music, including an imprint dedicated entirely to the St Simons Island sessions.
• In 1995, Rounder Records released thirteen volumes of the "Southern Journey" as a CD series.^[12]
• In 2010, a new five LP series, featuring a host of previously unreleased material from the tour was curated by Nathan Salsburg of the Association of Cultural Equity, and Eric Isaacson of Portland, Oregon's Mississippi Records.
• In 2012, digitised versions of the entire recordings were released for free online by the Association of Cultural Equity,^[13] who are also running a repatriation scheme, returning Lomax's digitized recordings and photographs to the places they were collected.^[14]