I have been listening to some Pete Seeger and some blues and old-timey music and I found this documentary via youtube.
Alan Lomax. "Appalachian Journey" (1991)Between 1978–85, the great American folklorist and musicologist
Alan Lomax revisited his old song-hunting grounds, the Deep South and South West, with a PBS film crew to make a television series called American Patchwork. It finally aired in 1991, using only a fraction of the 400 hours of footage. Now, a selection of this material – interviews, songs, and dances by farmers, railwaymen, blues singers, and tall-tale spinners – have been made available, in true Lomax spirit, to all. Not via some luxurious DVD box set, but on an open-access YouTube channel dedicated to his work. The channel has been set up by the Association for Cultural Equity, the charitable organization set up by Lomax in 1983, and which now preserves and promotes the legacy of its founder, who died in 2002.
An unorthodox portrait of Reagan’s America is revealed through these short outtakes. In the era of movies like Tron and Back To The Future, here is a world of music – a Sacred Harp weeping prayer, Clyde Maxwell’s wood-chopping holler, Joe Savage’s Texan blues, the wonderfully wiry coal miner and union activist Nimrod Workman – largely unchanged since Lomax was visiting Parchman Farm with his father in the 1930s; only the backdrops and interiors have modernized. There are surprises, too, such as Chester Zardis’s fluent jazz bass solo.
As well as these clips, which are being daily added, the channel is hosting older rarities, such as the evocative 16-minute documentary
To Hear Your Banjo Play from 1947, narrated by Pete Seeger. Brownie McGhee, Woody Guthrie, and Seeger himself appear in the film, which relates the banjo’s history, first as an African survival made with gourds and possum skins, then as the 20th-century accompaniment to hoedowns, spirituals, and field hollers. There are also outtakes from Lomax’s film
The Land Where The Blues Began, and a wonderful episode of Boston TV’s Screening Room, a 1975 arts program where he showed his film Dance And Human History and began to elucidate the questions about the similarities and differences in cultures that would mushroom into his weighty theories of Cantometrics in the last years of his life.
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