Person

John Lomax

Related Excerpts

The Ferguson Unit Rhythmeer Band plays at the Jim Ferguson Unit in Madison County, Texas.

The Blues Behind Bars: How Southern Prisons Shaped American Music

Incarcerated musicians have crafted some of the most iconic songs in American music history while prisons reap the profits.
Musical notation and a drawing of a barbed wire fence.

The Musical Legacy of a Mississippi Prison Farm

The new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning” collects gospel songs recorded inside a notorious penitentiary.
Prisoners at Parchman Farm march to work on cotton fields

‘It’s a Charged Place’: Parchman Farm, the Mississippi Prison with a Remarkable Musical History

Inmates at this bucolic but brutal prison have long been singing the blues to sustain themselves, and a new compilation of gospel songs continues the legacy.
Mural depicting bluesman John Dee Holeman and friends playing on the front porch of a house.

The Living Legacy of the Piedmont Blues

The music that grew out of Durham's tobacco manufacturing plants influenced some of the most widely recorded musicians of the last 65 years—and still does.
Odetta sitting on a park bench playing a guitar.

How Odetta Revolutionized Folk Music

She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.
Johnny Cash in front of a microphone.

Johnny Cash Is a Hero to Americans on the Left and Right. But His Music Took a Side.

Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears again.
Marian Anderson looking downwards

Marian Anderson’s Bone-Chilling Rendition of “Crucifixion”

Her performances of the Black spiritual in the nineteen-thirties caused American and European audiences to fall silent in awe.
An illustration of an accordion being played.

The "Good Old Rebel" at the Heart of the Radical Right

How a satirical song mocking uneducated Confederates came to be embraced as an anthem of white Southern pride.

Somebody Died, Babe: A Musical Cover-Up of Racism, Violence, and Greed

Beneath the popular folk song, “Swannanoa Tunnel” and the railroad tracks that run through Western North Carolina is a story of blood, greed, and obfuscation.

Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?

How Depression-Era racial dynamics may have shaped our understanding of antebellum enslaved life.
Blackfoot Chief, Mountain Chief making phonographic record at Smithsonian, February 9, 1916.

Eavesdropping on History

By all accounts, young Bill Owens was a natural song-catcher, trawling across Texas in the 1930s, the golden era of American field recording.