For your listening pleasure…

The Association for Cultural Equality was founded by American Folklorist and Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax to preserve the “intangible heritage” of humanity. Starting in the 30’s, traveling with a tin can recorder powered by car batteries, Lomax recorded people making joyful noise, preservation for posterity. The American South- blues soaked or banjo based, far flung calypso islands, the Gnaoua of Morocco, sketches of Spain, giants of jazz, crooners, raconteurs, ragtime kings, and clear voiced mountain queens. Our songs, our stories, our oral histories, our git-boxes, our diddley bows, and our polyrhythms. Decades of sound saved, history kept. For your listening pleasure, the Association for Cultural Equality has made 17,000 of those sound recordings available FOR FREE online. AMAZING. Listen here.

 
Besos to Anna for the heads up.

Author: loiseaufait

Little by little the bird feathers its nest, and object by heart burnished object we surround ourselves with lovely necessities of memory and function. It is these things that make a silly Apartment a Home or a silly Wednesday an Occasion. Whether my nest is an old farmhouse, a sixth floor tenement walk up, or a brownstone basement... whether I share it with family, vagabonds, women of heart and mind, or a little brown cat and a sweet ginger banjo, my principal joy is filling it with light and laughter (and corralling). View all posts by loiseaufait