Word: lomax
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Terry and McGee made their first Boston appearance in the opening offering of the Folklore Concert Series at Jordan Hall and gave a sampling of their repertory at the Vanity. Alan Lomax, America's greatest living folklorist, gave one of his rare public performances and it's too bad he didn't stay around longer. He brought with him a pleasant English girl named Shirley Collins, who sang some ballads in a thinnish voice...
Opening the program with Everybody Loves Saturday Night, Lomax rambled through a couple of Great Lakes ballads, and Range of the Buffalo, displaying the charm which contributed to his success as a folksong collector for the Library of Congress...
...Lomax returned to lead the audience in Almost Done, a song he collected years ago from penitentiaries, when the wardens permitted him to visit with the prisoners and swap songs and stories. Terry and McGee rocked through I Don't Want No Cornbread and Molasses, straight out of a southern jail, and marched out with When the Saints Go Marching...
Life & Love. Although he is neither a trained musician nor an anthropologist, Lomax has arrived at some general conclusions. For example, people in remote (often Northern) parts of continental European countries tend to "take life and love easy"; they sing in choral groups with open throats, often using frankly sexual words and lyrics. As he moved to less remote areas, Lomax found increasing "frustration and melancholy," accompanied by a nasal, constricted-throat, high-pitched style of singing that comes originally from the Orient...
...Lomax aired his theories on England's highbrow Third Programme in one of the most popular series in BBC history (commemorated by Punch in a cartoon of a down-at-the-mouth hillbilly singing: "I've got those Alan-Lomax-ain't-been-around-to-record-me blues"). Now back in the U.S., Lomax would like to "turn the loudspeakers around" and convert Americans from a nation of audiophiles into folk performers. An eminently folksy sound-representing, according to Lomax, the "furthest intrusion of Negro folksong into U.S. pop music: rock 'n' roll...