Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

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Go directly to the collection, Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, in American Memory, or view a Summary of Resources related to the collection.

Southern Mosaic's variety of materials makes this collection an excellent resource for projects in which students can gain an exceptionally deep understanding of historical topics and issues and conduct thorough research. The collection also affords students the rare opportunity to learn to analyze and interpret songs based on their cultural and historical contexts.

Students can read the Special Presentation, "The 1939 Recording Expedition," or The 1939 Southern Recording Trip Report and view the collection's regional map to get a chronological sense of the Lomaxes' trip through the South. Printing the map from the collection or tracing the region from an atlas, students can plot and chronologically number the towns, cities, and counties mentioned in the reports, fieldnotes, and captions. Students can then plot the geographical locations from which some of their favorite songs and images originated, thereby fitting them into a chronological as well as geographical context.

Map of Southern Region.

Historical Comprehension

The number and variety of this collection's materials allow students to gain a deep and multifaceted understanding of several historical topics. The African-American experience of the South, as outlined in the U.S. History section, is just one. A second topic is religion in the South.

Baptist preacher, Alma Plantation, False River, Louisiana. "Prayer" "The Gospel Train"

The numerous spirituals in Southern Mosaic, promising redemption and warning sinners, attest to the importance of a distinctive evangelical Christian culture in the South, many aspects of which were shared by blacks and whites alike. Students can listen to recordings from among 131 spirituals as well as recordings found under the subject headings of benedictions, hymns, prayers, religious songs, music, and oratory to learn more about not only evangelical Christianity, but Mexican Catholicism as well. They can also view images listed under a number of subject headings including spiritual life, baptism, pulpits, churches, and clergy. In addition to this visual and auditory data, students can round off their comprehension of religion in the South by doing full-text searches on a variety of terms such as church, preacher, Sunday, God, and Dios locating lyrics and fieldnotes such as the excerpt below. Similarly comprehensive explorations may be done of rural life in the South and folk music.

What can you determine from these materials about the uses of religious rhetoric and religious ideas such as redemption and sin in the South? How are the uses the same and different for different communities, such as African Americans in Louisiana, Caucasians in Texas, and Mexicans in the Southwest? Are the religious songs inspirational or instructional? What feelings do they inspire? What messages and information do they relate? How are the sounds of religious songs related to the ideas they express?

Baptism near Mineola, Texas.

For the evening Mr. Robertson had investigated Negro rural servicers We were told that the Little Hope Baptist congregation would have services. It looked like rain, but we started out. On the way we learned from Negroes on foot that the group was gathering at the school-house which was nearer than the church house. When we arrived some fifty people of all ages had gathered. The house was dimly lighted but we set to work as quickly as possible, since lightning was beginning to flash. Perhaps the congregation did not feel at home here, but response came slowly. Finally we did record several lined hymns and spirituals and one very pretty cradle song. By the time we had packed up ready to go, the rain was coming down in sheets....with the careful driving of Mr. Robertson we slid safely along the clay roads home. I couldn't help wondering what the "Sunday Best" of those faithful church members looked like after they had waded through the rain over the several miles that many had to travel. They are a very patient, fine-spirited people.

Historical Analysis and Interpretation

Southern Mosaic's images and fieldnotes provide a context for its songs that can be used to help students learn how to analyze and interpret songs. Students can access the full significance of work songs by considering them in conjunction with related images and texts. Have students listen to songs listed in the Audio Subject Index under work songs, field hollers, hollers, and mule-driving songs. Then, to find related lyrics and fieldnotes, students can do a full text search of work, calls, or leader. For images of men singing as they work, search workers . Students can use these materials as a starting point for analysis and interpretation with the following questions:

African-American convicts working with axes and singing in woodyard, Reed Camp, South Carolina. "New Buryin' Ground"

• What can you learn from the fieldnotes and images about who sang work songs, how they were sung, when, and why?
• What kinds of tasks are mentioned in these songs?
• What do the voice parts, mood, rhythm, rhyme, speed, repetition, assonance, and alliteration indicate about what kind of work was done to these songs?
• What attitudes toward work are reflected in these songs' lyrics and tones?
• While many of these songs are about work, they are often about other things as well. What are some of the other subjects of work songs?
• How are these subjects related to work? Why might laborers have sung about these subjects while working? What does this suggest about the work and workers' attitudes toward it?
• What roles did work songs play in workers' lives?

	"Lightnin'" Washington, an African American prisoner, singing with his group in the woodyard at Darrington State Farm, Texas.	Similar exercises may be done with songs listed under any number of headings in the Audio Subject Index, including spirituals, blues songs, ballads, and lullabies. Researching the collection for images and texts about those who sang folk songs provides enough historical and cultural context to begin asking questions about the uses and significance of these songs, which came not from professional musicians on the radio, but out of the everyday needs and joys of communities.
"Steel Driving Song"

Historical Issue-Analysis and Decision-Making

Students can use this collection to study two historical issues with continuing relevance today. First, they can better understand the passions surrounding the issue of immigration and the possible consequences of the way in which immigration and border culture are regulated. The early twentieth century, including the decade just prior to the Lomax's expedition saw forced and violent removal and even killing of Mexican immigrants. For a picture of the violence and poverty of border culture, students can read notes about the street singer, Jose Saurez, his border ballads, and other songs recorded in Brownsville, Texas, in section 6 of the fieldnotes. Provide students with a contemporary account of border issues from a newspaper and have them consider how and why border issues and culture have and have not changed. What are the problems and potential solutions of this issue? For more information about the culture and controversies surrounding the Mexican border, including a history of the Mexican Revolution, refer to The South Texas Border, 1900-1930.

Second, students may also use this collection to study the homogenization of culture, as outlined in the U.S. History section. Have students consider the following citation and questions:

Uncle Rich Brown and John A. Lomax. . . .

The Texas Folklore Society's founding members shared with Lomax a sense that their state's rich folklore needed to be documented and preserved for the analysis of later scholars. Nascent technology such as the radio and the gramophone, it was feared, would end the age-old tradition of transmitting music and lore directly from one person to the next . . . Ironically, (Lomax) relied on the latest technological advances to document the very oral tradition he feared technology would destroy. From "Southern Mosaic" in the Library of Congress's online "Information Bulletin".

• Can a technological form of documentation accurately preserve an art form that is based on live, person-to-person transmission?
• Is folk music still authentic once it's been recorded, or does it become something else once it can be mass-produced, distributed, and heard outside of its cultural and historical context?
• Have the radio and other technologies ended the tradition of "transmitting music and lore directly from one person to the next?" If so, what have we lost?
• What other art forms and lifestyles have been squelched by the growth of mass culture?
• Has a mass culture taken over in America, or are their elements of culture that defy homogenization?
• Are there elements of culture today that are threatened by mass culture and merit preservation and documentation? How might you go about doing this?
• Is a mass culture necessarily a bad thing? What are its costs and benefits?
• With increasingly global technologies and economies and the appearance of McDonald's and Disney theme parks throughout the world, are we headed toward a global mass culture? Or will we choose to preserve cultural differences? How can this be done?

Southern Mosaic affords students the opportunity to research the experiences of people who don't usually receive attention in text books. For example, materials documenting prison life can be used to explore the social function of prisons in the segregated South. Sources range from songs like "Have You Ever Been to Nashville" and "New Buryin' Ground" to John Lomax's summary of his time at the Cummins State Farm near Varner, Arkansas on page 196 of the fieldnotes' section 14. For more sources, do keyword and full-text searches on prison, pen, convict, jail, sentence, Govenor, Gov'ner, and chain gang and explore links in "The 1939 Recording Expedition". The collection can also be used to study the experience of children and Spanish-speaking Southerners.

Prison compound no. 1, Angola, Louisiana.