Voices from the past

[shewhomust]

My house is cluttered with - among other things - stacks of old newspapers. Sometimes I think I should simply throw them out, but mostly I try to look through them before I do, and that's why today's link is to an article about Alan Lomax from the Guardian of almost four years ago.

It quotes Shirley Collins, who accompanied Alan Lomax on a trip through the south:

"We had been recording old songs in the hills of north Mississippi with people in their 80s and 90s playing fiddles and cane fifes, a music that was very African in sound and feel. After a couple of nights, they suggested that we hear a neighbour of theirs, a younger man called Fred McDowell. I wasn't sure about it. I didn't want it to break the spell.

"He didn't come until evening, when he'd finished picking his cotton. This very slight figure walked into the clearing, wearing dungarees, carrying his guitar. He sat down and started playing and you just knew immediately that something remarkable had happened. We both had tears in our eyes."

I love this reminder that the different streams of folk music, from the purest voice of English tradition to the the deepest of American roots, flow together.