Field recording

Assembled from 23 blocks · 2 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. Recording music where it is performed rather than where a company wants to sell it — carrying the apparatus to the singer instead of the singer to a studio. In the 1930s this was a physical undertaking: the disc cutter John and Alan Lomax took into Louisiana in 1933 was an instantaneous aluminium-disc recorder, and the assembly they hauled weighed on the order of three hundred and fifty pounds, powered by heavy batteries and carried in the boot of a car. The method's intellectual claim is that a commercial catalogue is a biased sample and that what is not sellable is not therefore unimportant, so the collector should go to prisons, farms, churches and porches. Its ethical problem is inseparable from that claim and has been argued about ever since: the collector chooses what is recorded and how it is described, holds the resulting copyright or deposit rights, and frequently gains a career from material given by people who did not. Both the value and the problem are visible in the same collections, which is why field recording belongs in this Journey as a practice with consequences rather than as a neutral act of preservation.
3. Knowledge
4. Sound recording
5. Field recording
6. Connections
7. Sound recording
8. The Lomaxes record Lead Belly at Angola
9. Muddy Waters is recorded at Stovall Farm
10. The American Folklife Center acquires the Alan Lomax Collection
11. Electrical recording
12. Race records
13. Radio diffusion
14. Field recording
15. Edison demonstrates recorded and reproduced sound
16. Berliner patents the gramophone
17. The first jazz record is made
18. KDKA broadcasts
19. Victor and Columbia adopt electrical recording
20. The Kumasi Trio record in London
21. Evidence
22. John A. and Alan Lomax, recording for the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song with a newly supplied instantaneous aluminium-disc recorder, met and recorded Huddie Ledbetter at Angola prison farm in Louisiana in July 1933; the resulting discs and documentation are held at the American Folklife Center. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to this Library of Congress research guide; the guide was not opened and no item or call number is cited.
23. The Lomaxes met and recorded Lead Belly at Angola around 16–20 July 1933; Alan Lomax's subsequent collecting spanned more than sixty years and several continents, and included extended 1938 Library of Congress sessions with Jelly Roll Morton. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to the Association for Cultural Equity chronology; the chronology was not opened and no session log was consulted.