Coal Digging Blues: Songs of West Virginia Miners, compiled by Mark Allan Jackson, is the eighth addition to the WVU Press Sound Archive series. Drawing upon gospels, blues, and country musical influences, the musicians on this compilation explicate the hardships and hopes of Great Depression-era West Virginia coal miners. The songs and stories on the CD were collected by folklorist George Korson when he traveled to mining communities in northern and eastern West Virginia in the 1940s. Some of the songs from Korson's visit were released by the Library of Congress under the title Songs and...
Coal Digging Blues: Songs of West Virginia Miners, compiled by Mark Allan Jackson, is the eighth addition to the WVU Press Sound Archive series. Drawi...
In 1933, John Lomax and his young son Alan traveled by car to a number of prisons scattered throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. In the nation s most restricted spaces, they recorded African-American convicts, who Lomax thought would be some of the last singers of traditional folk material due to the isolation of the institutions that held them. As a result of this fieldwork, we now have access to a multitude of powerful songs, both well and little known, which provide some understanding of this folk group during the era of Jim Crow in America s South. "
In 1933, John Lomax and his young son Alan traveled by car to a number of prisons scattered throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee...
