Alan Lomax Texas Folk Songs
Released :August 8, 2012
Label : Essential Media Group
Format ; [email protected]
Sleeve Notes:
The main body of the Texas settlers came from the South, and the majority of the folksongs found in the State belong to the Southern white or Negro musical families. Ballads, love songs, fiddle tunes and hymns common to the pioneer south have been found in Texas, but many songs did not survive the western trek, and many others have been "westernized." Tunes were flattened out, simplified and often lost their modal quality. Many of the old ballads and songs of tormented and tragic love did not survive on this new frontier. Texas was a man's world and the Texans faced so many real dangers — day-by-day fighting Indians and Mexicans, riding wild mustangs and handling the dangerous longhorn cattle — that many of the romances and tragedies of Britain lost their hold. Fiction could not match the facts of the adventure-filled lives.
Texans turned to song-making on their own account, composing ballads about their experiences on the range. These "new" songs were remakes of the traditional stock, largely in the come-all-ye style popular among Northern lumberjacks. A great many Texas cowboy tunes are thus, Irish or Scots, and members of the tune-stock common in the Northern part of the U.S. These Northern tunes were, however, sung in Southern poor white style — entirely unaccompanied and in the open air — the voices high and hard and nasal — the tunes often decorated in the southern mountain manner. So it was that the Texas plainsmen produced the songs which sound so "American" to most of us — they represent a blend of the two main song stocks in our white tradition.
From the beginning Negroes played an important part in the settlement of Texas and the development of her folksongs. As soon as the state was opened up, white planters poured in from the East bringing their slaves from lands exhausted by the Southern one-crop economy. East Texas and South Texas were cleared and farmed by Negroes; Negro slaves worked as ranch-hands in South Texas and took an important part in making and singing the new cowboy ballads.
Some of the finest ante-bellum Negro songs have survived on the prison farms of that area, where the slave system continued long after the civil war and certain plantations were converted into state prison farms after the Civil War. The isolated cotton farms of the Brazos and Trinity River bottoms produced a host of singers like Lead Belly, Texas Alexander and Blind Lemon Jefferson (the father of the blues on records). Original songs were legion — the Boll Weevil, The Midnight Special, Pick a Bale of Cotton, Shorty George, etc. Here again, Texas became a world to itself; few of the work songs so important in the East (John Henry, Poor Lazarus, Take this Hammer, etc.) have been found in the Lone Star State.
Tracklist :
1. Rambling Gambler [3:08]
2. I'm Bound To Follow The Longhorn Cows [3:43]
3. Lord Lovell [3:12]
4. The Rich Old Lady [3:24]
5. Long Summer Days [2:17]
6. Ain't No More Cane On This Brazis 3:11]
7. All The Pretty Little Horses [1:49]
8. Billy Barlow [2:46]
9. The Wild Rippling Water [3:12]
10. Rattlesnake [1:34]
11. Sam Bass [3:26]
12. The Dying Cowboy [3:23]
13. Godamighty Drag [3:14]
14. Eadie [3:54]
15. Black Betty [1:55]
16. My Little John Henry [2:28]
Alan Lomax, one of the greatest folkmusic collectors and authorities, is the son of John A. Lomax, first of the great American folksong collectors. Their major collaborations, Our Singing Country and Folksong USA, remain the most exciting and comprehensive selections of American songs. Alan left Harvard to follow his father with a recording machine into the Brazos country and the prison farms, then to travel alone to the North Woods and New Orleans, to Mexico and Haiti, and make the first surveys of Britain, Spain and Italy and to compile a World Library of Folk Music for Columbia Records. Scarcely more than twenty, he took charge of the folklore archive of the Library of Congress. Other projects included writing radio scripts, producing documentary radio for home and overseas, making records and ballad operas with the new generation of folksingers, many of whom owe their careers to his first fostering. Since 1950, he has worked almost continually for the British Broadcasting Corporation, sending them tapes, planning and writing programs.
About his two accompanists, Alan Lomax says: "I should certainly have never felt like making this record if I had not found a sympathetic collaborator in Guy Carawan, whose guitar and banjo accompaniments give these songs the color and excitement lacking in my own singing. John Cole, a London aircraft worker, but an American by musical instinct, plays the kind of harmonica that would have made him welcome to any cow outfit."
