Real Food of an Aural Kind

I keep planning to make a post on something other than music--for example, the discussion about Rome begun below--but currently I'm at a high point of interest in music, so I'm just going to run with that.

(Record companies, take note: some of us were saying, five or six years ago, that if y'all would just make it easy for people to download music legally, and to sample music before buying, it would actually increase people's interest in your back catalogue. Good thing you finally started to catch on--after spending millions on legal fees, and losing millions more through illegal downloads. I, ahem, of course don't know anybody who ever downloaded anything illegally--just talkin' here.)

Anyway, I recommend a visit to the Alan Lomax Archive. Lomax was an American musicologist heavily active in the mid-twentieth century, and recorded hundreds of hours' worth of traditional songs by African Americans, southern whites, and members of other ethnic groups. It's an incredible thing that he did, a massive act of preservation, like saving a Victorian building or a hundred-year-old oak tree, and without his work, treasures of inestimable worth would simply be gone.

The Lomax site enables visitors to hear samples of all kinds of amazing material: for example, I was listening to work songs recorded at Mississippi's state prison, Parchman, in 1959. You can also hear old African folk songs sung by descendants of slaves living in coastal Georgia, as well as traditional ballads by mountain people in West Virginia, Cajun music sung by people for whom English was barely a first language, and so on. An amazing experience!

Recently I was thinking about the fact that the great rock musicians of the 1950s and 1960s grew up listening to the kind of music that took more than a little thought and effort to get into: for example, the haunted blues of Robert Johnson. And there are still artists today who dig deep into the roots of American music, but many more of them grew up with nothing beyond what was available in the popular culture of radio and MTV--songs that were second-, third-, or fifteenth-hand copies of much more authentic originals. It's as though the original rock icons such as John Lennon or Bob Dylan grew up on a diet of whole, natural foods, whereas a later generation sustained themselves on processed materials leached of most of their vitamins.

By that analogy, listening to the music at the Alan Lomax site is like eating fresh vegetables: sure it would be easier to consume junk food, and junk is always easier to appreciate, but in the end, you'll feel much better--and your body and soul will thank you--if you eat something that's good for you.

So stop by and establish an account--it's free. Samples come through iTunes, where a lot of the Alan Lomax recordings are for sale.