Jimmie”) Rodgers presents Jimmie as a crucible in which the “darkey songs” he learned as a boy are transmuted by “the natural music in his Irish soul” into something distinctive and new.”3 The songs that Carrie writes on were created by the African American men that worked of the rails and influenced Jimmie Rodgers. In the article “ Country Music and the Souls of White Folk ” by Erich Nunn, we get a sense of the effect that the Gandy Dancer’s music has had on country music, we are told, “ In My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers, a biography of her late husband published in 1935, Carrie Williamson (“Mrs. These songs created by African Americans and immigrants created a new slang term for these people called “Gandy Dancers”. Unfortunately there are little to no record of the songs created by immigrants in different languages and today there is no way of rediscovering those songs. The creators of the railroads songs included African Americans and many immigrant people. The subjects of the songs, that are recorded, range from the erotic, basic railroad construction, and common themes like love and loss. These songs were created by workers to entertain and convey stories up and down the rails. But regardless of birthplace, songs moved up and down the main line or were shunted onto isolated spur tracks.”1 John Lomax had recorded many of these railroad songs. Others were born in Tin Pan Alley rooms or bars.
#John lomax archive#
Archie Green suggests in “Railroad Songs and Ballads: From the Archive of Folk Song” that “ welled directly out of the experiences of workers and were composed literally to the rhythm of the handcar. We can all recall “I’ve been Working on the Railroad” (pre Civil War), but it is unclear if that is one example of the genres earliest pieces. The origin of the genre is disputed and rather mysterious. The Grey Goose by James “Iron Head” Baker with R.D.Railroad songs were a genre created by laborers for the railroads in America.Black Betty by James “Iron Head” Baker with R.D.
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My Yellow Gal by James “Iron Head” Baker with R.D.Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos by Ernest “Mexico” Williams with James “Iron Head” Baker.Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos by Ernest “Mexico” Williams 1933.The Midnight Special by Ernest “Mexico” Williams.That’s Alright, Honey by Mose “Clear Rock” Platt.Also available as a CD through WVU Press. Jail House Bound is released digitally by Global Jukebox in collaboration with West Virginia University Press. The album is introduced by noted American music scholar Mark Allan Jackson (author of Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie). Jail House Bound, a production of West Virginia University Press, collects the earliest of the Lomaxes' prison recordings-made between July and December 1933 in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee-and draws on new remasters from the fragile original acetate discs. By late 1934, they had recorded dozens of singers and hundreds of songs-"poetic expressions," as Lomax described them, "of pungent wit, simple beauty, startling imagery, extraordinary vividness and power." The Lomaxes recorded the songs of timber and ground-clearing gangs, chants of the road and railroad crews, solo field hollers with their roots running deep into the antebellum south they also recorded comic songs, blues, and spirituals. Joined by his seventeen-year-old son Alan, Lomax visited some of the most notorious Southern penitentiaries-among them Sugar Land in Texas Angola in Louisiana Parchman Farm in Mississippi-where he knew anachronistic strains of African American folk-song would be preserved away from the influence of the radio, the phonograph, and cross-pollination with whites.
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Lomax made the first of his field-recording trips through the American South. In 1933, with the support of Macmillan Publishers and the Music Division of the Library of Congress, John A. JAIL HOUSE BOUND: JOHN LOMAX'S FIRST SOUTHERN PRISON RECORDINGS, 1933