Search - Alan Lomax :: Deep River of Song: Mississippi - Saints & Sinners

Alan Lomax
Deep River of Song: Mississippi - Saints & Sinners
Genres: Blues, Folk, International Music, Pop, Gospel

Track Listings (25) - Disc #1
1. It's Better to Be Born Lucky
2. Stagolee
3. Walking Billy
4. Mississippi Sounding Calls
5. Come Here, Dog, And Get Your Bone
6. Emmaline, Take Your Time
7. Hog Hunt
8. Fox Hunter's Song
9. Time Is Getting Hard
10. Diamond Joe
11. One Morning at the Break of Day (Wake Up Song)
12. Workin' on the Levee, Sleepin' on de Ground
13. Lord, I'm in Trouble
14. Stewball
15. Rosie
16. French Blues
17. Rock Daniel
18. Interview
19. Hallelu, Hallelu
20. I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray
21. Conversion Experience
22. Let Me Ride
23. If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down
24. Little David
25. Calvary

CD Details

All Artists: Alan Lomax
Title: Deep River of Song: Mississippi - Saints & Sinners
Members Wishing: 7
Total Copies: 0
Label: Rounder Select
Original Release Date: 8/17/1999
Release Date: 8/17/1999
Genres: Blues, Folk, International Music, Pop, Gospel
Styles: Delta Blues, Traditional Blues, Traditional Folk
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPC: 011661182424

Synopsis

Amazon.com

The field recordings made from 1936 to 1942 for the Library of Congress by John and Ruby Lomax, with their son Alan, showed that much of America's finest music and poetry have come from far beyond the entertainment and publishing industries. In the case of these stirring selections from the Lomax archives, among this country's richest cultural resources was the black population enslaved on southern plantations and penal farms. Evident here are echoes of lost worlds--the eerie sounding call of a Mississippi ferryman, the mystery of Charlie Butler's stunning "Diamond Joe," and the fierce spirituality of "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down" by Reverend C.H. Savage and congregation. Most extraordinary are the performances by Sid Hemphill, who Alan Lomax said was his greatest discovery. Playing the ancient pre-harmonica quills or panpipes, whooping with primal fervor, his ingenious "Emmaline, Take Your Time" anticipates Hemphill's unreleased fife-and-drum masterpiece, "The Devil's Dream." --Alan Greenberg

CD Reviews

Essential music for String Band and Blues and more

Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 11/14/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is essential music for anyone looking into the traditions of African American music, whether string band, blues, or whatever.

There is so much heritage and so much of the traditional rhythms that have since been smothered out of Black churck music in the interventing years on the religious tunes. There are several of the old Church Rocks and preaching as musical as any song or dance here.

As a string band musician on banjo, guitar, and fiddle, I naturally gravitate to the superb music of Sid Hemphill, Lucius Smith and Will Head in Sledge Mississippi (btw this is the Mississippi Cotton Pickin town that Black CW star Charlie Pride grew up in and wrote the song about). Hemphill is fantastic as a fiddle and a quiller, and this band has a distinct rhythm that no other string band matches.

It should be noted that on the same day that Lomax recorded these string band selections, he recorded a number of selections by the same group playing in a band with quill or fife and drum. You can hear these if you get a copy of the "Traveling Through the Jungle" collection of Black drum band recordings.

It is a shame that nobody has bothered to put all the recordings Lomax and other did of Sid Hemphill, Lucius Smith and their various band mates in 1941 and 1942 and in the 1950s out on one CD and one has to gather different CDS to find them, for example more string band music by this group appears (misplaced in) this series's Black Appalachia recording even though these people were from the hill country of Mississippi and nowhere near Appalachia. Still other string band recordings and solo work by Hemphill and Smith are on David Evan's superb collection, Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi. If you are into banjo Evans collection's booklet, a treasure for anyone into African American traiditional music in its own right, has a great explanation of Smith's banjo style."