American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

node · earth · Washington, D.C.

The division of the Library of Congress that holds the United States' national archive of ethnographic sound, successor in function to the Archive of American Folk Song for which the Lomaxes recorded from 1933. It is the reason a Journey like this one can rest on primary material rather than on recollection: the 1930s and 1940s field discs, the manuscripts, the photographs and the fieldwork documentation are in one place and catalogued. In 2004 the Center acquired the Alan Lomax Collection — the material Lomax gathered after his Library of Congress years, previously housed at Hunter College in New York — which retrieved accounts describe as including more than five thousand hours of sound recordings, four hundred thousand feet of motion picture film, some two and a half thousand videotapes and a working library. The acquisition reunited that material with the discs he and his father had deposited in the 1930s and 1940s, so the family's output sits together for the first time. What an archive holds determines what later generations can argue about, which makes the institution a participant in this story rather than a footnote to it.