The Lomaxes record Lead Belly at Angola
John A. Lomax and his eighteen-year-old son Alan, travelling the South for the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song with a newly issued instantaneous aluminium-disc recorder, reach Angola prison farm in Louisiana and record Huddie Ledbetter. The apparatus and its batteries weighed on the order of three hundred and fifty pounds. The session is the point at which institutional field recording in the United States begins to produce material that commercial catalogues would never have collected — and it begins in a prison, which is a fact about where the collectors expected to find what they were looking for.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Alan Lomax · person · United States · not located
- Field recording · process · not located
- American Folklife Center, Library of Congress · institution · United States · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
Lead Belly: Resources in the American Folklife Center
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.
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center · Partly verified
guides.loc.gov/leadbelly-folklife
Lead Belly / Lomax chronology
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.
Association for Cultural Equity · Partly verified
culturalequity.org, Lead Belly / Lomax chronology and biography of Alan Lomax
Recorded on Alan Lomax
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.