LC National Digital Library announces "Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax collection"

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This announcement is being widely posted

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The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program announces the
release of ?Southern Mosaic:  The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern
States Recording Trip Collection? at the American memory website at the
following URL:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lohtml/lohome.html

This multiformat ethnographic field collection includes 686 sound
recordings, as well as photographic prints, fieldnotes, dust jackets,
and other manuscripts documenting folksingers and folksongs discovered
on the Lomax's three-month, 6,502-mile trip through eight Southern
states: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South
Carolina, and Georgia.

Beginning in Port Aransas, Texas, on March 31, 1939, and ending at the
Library of Congress on June 14, 1939, John Avery Lomax, Honorary
Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the
Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center), and his wife, Ruby
Terrill Lomax, recorded approximately 25 hours of music from more than
300 performers.  The recordings represent a broad spectrum of musical
styles, including ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle
tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas,
spirituals, and work songs.  Over 100 songs are sung in Spanish.

A special presentation on the collection provides a state-by-state
snapshot of the Lomaxes' expedition, highlighting the diverse musical
styles of each region, the variety of documentation archived by the
collectors, and many of their experiences on this field expedition
through the rural South in the 1930s.

The sound recordings in the Southern Mosaic collection were taken from
disc recordings in the Library's collections.  When original discs were
unavailable preservation tapes were used.  The analog audio from the
discs and tapes were transferred to Digital Audio Tape (DAT) to produce
a master source for digitization.  Some surface noise and scratching may
be apparent on the recordings since they have not been enhanced or
altered in any way from their original state.  WAVE and RealAudio
versions have been supplied for each recording.  The WAVE files were
created from the DAT tape at a sampling rate of 22,050 samples per
second, 16-bit word length, and a single (mono) channel. The RealAudio
files were derived from the WAVE files through means of digital
processing and were created for users who have at least a 14.4 modem.

Patrons wishing to use this collection can search for items in many
ways, including by city, state, and county where the recording took
place, performer name, song title, musical genre, and recording venue.
Also included in the collection is an extensive bibliography and
discography for those interested in doing further research on the folk
music documented in this collection.

The presentation of this online collection is made possible by the
generous support of The Texaco Foundation.

Other folklife-related online collections, selected publications of the
American Folklife Center, and information about products and services
are available from the Center's homepage:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/folklife
This collection is the fifth American Folklife Center contribution to
the American Memory Web site. 

Please send any questions regarding this or other American Memory
Collections to ndlpcoll@xxxxxxx