HUM 223: "Sounds of Slavery" -- mp3 files

Sound files of 18 field recordings of African American musicians of the 1930s are available on Beacon Press' website for a book called The Sounds of Slavery by Shane White and Graham White. They are, as the authors note, as close as we'll ever get to the roots of African American music. And there's no charge for downloading them.

The sound files go with the book, which can be ordered from Beacon Press or online vendors like Amazon.com. It's simply one of the most interesting books I've ever read. WNYC, the classical music radio station in New York City, has an online excerpt from the first chapter of the book that describes the recordings, many of which were made by 1930s-vintage musicologists John and Alan Lomax:

The African Americans whom the Lomaxes auditioned and then recorded on what John Lomax called their “portable-machine for electrical sound-recording”28—on the 1933 trip the machine weighed 350 pounds—were the children and grandchildren of slaves. Unlike earlier collectors, whose transcriptions of performances depended on the transcriber’s skill and judgment, the Lomaxes relied on technology to secure what they believed was the unmediated original. After one field trip, John Lomax described the 150 tunes with which he had returned as “sound photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own element, unrestrained, uninfluenced and undirected by anyone who has had his own notions of how the songs should be rendered.” But like the photographs to which Lomax compared his recordings, they contain ambivalences. Recordings, too, can strike a pose. For even though the Lomaxes used machines, they saw themselves as being in pursuit of subjects whom modernity had passed by. And this vision, in turn, shaped both their journeys and the sounds they enshrined. In search of an older, more “authentic” African American culture—in our terms, one closer to the time of slavery—the Lomaxes rummaged through the “eddies of human society” in remote cotton plantations, lumber camps, and, most famously, segregated southern prisons. Part of the reason they were so excited by their “discovery” of the talent of Leadbelly was that they felt that the great blues singer’s “eleven years of confinement had cut him off both from the phonograph and from the radio”—the fact that Leadbelly felt otherwise was beside the point.29 What is exciting about listening to the material from the field trips into the South of the 1930s is that the folk artists whose voices one hears reveal ways of singing and talking that had been heard from the lips of former slaves. It most definitely is not as though a tape recorder had been left on in the woods near the plantation on which Frederick Douglass toiled as a slave, but these recordings bring us about as close as we are ever going to get to hearing some of the familiar— and to white ears often “weird” and “unforgettable”—sounds of slavery.