Search - Alan Lomax :: World Library Of Folk & Primitive Music, Vol. 1: England

With the rise of another generation of English folk musicians like Eliza Carthy reviving again the interest in traditional English music, there's always a need to look back a few generations to see where the songs come from. In the seemingly endless reissues of the Alan Lomax recordings from the '50s and '60s there are treasures to be found, and his field trips to England, Ireland, and Scotland offer a lot of musical bounty. This set was made in cooperation with Peter Kennedy and the BBC, and offers a wealth of songs that were on the verge of being lost to the very mediums that preserved them, the gramophone and the radio. Lomax and Kennedy scoured the nation in 1951, finding the singers, accordionists, and fiddlers who still played the old songs, informally at home and professionally at dances and clubs, and made sure they were not forgotten. While the songs are familiar to fans of revivalists like Carthy and the previous generation like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, here we get the pure, unadulterated tales of country life and love. --Louis Gibson