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Introduction |
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John Lomax of Texas and his son Alan, the two men who created, under the brilliant direction of Herbert Putnam and Dr. Harold Spivacke, the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, is a body of words and of music which tells more about the American people than all the miles of their quadruple-lane express highways and all the acres of their bill-board plastered cities—a body of words and of music which tells almost as much about the American people as the marks they have made upon the earth itself. It is a book which many Americans will delight to open, and not once but many times.
But behind this book is another body of material (also a product of the work of Mr. Putnam and the Lomaxes) which reveals with even greater precision the character and the distinction of the mark left upon their music and their words by the people of this country. Behind it are the actual field recordings of the songs as their own singers sang them in the unreproduce-able rhythm and inflection and beat of the songs themselves.
Down to last year these recordings were available only to specialists who visited the Library—and not always to them. Many of the disks were too fragile to play more than a few times and none of them could be made publicly available. The Archive was an archive indeed, a rich store of priceless materials—but few men had ever used it or ever could.
As part of our present effort in the Library of Congress to make the American record, as it is stored here, truly and broadly available to the American people themselves, we approached the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the fall of 1939 with the request that funds be granted to enable the Library to establish a Sound Studio which could manufacture pressings of the recordings of the Archive, and of other comparable materials, for sale at cost to schools, colleges, students of folk song, and the public generally.
Thanks to the imagination and understanding of Dr. Frederick P. Kep-pel, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the grant was made in March 1940 and the Studio began work in June 1940. An order list of the recordings available is now in process of publication and will shortly be ready for public distribution. It is our hope that the Sound Studio, which works closely with the Archive of American Folk Song though under the direction of Mr. Jerome B. Weisner as Chief Engineer, will be of increasing service to lovers of folk music and particularly to those, in American schools and colleges, whose labor it is to teach the next generation of Americans what their country is and to what people they belong.
Archibald MacLeish.
Washington, August, 1941.
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