RE: Alan Lomax website, Sidney Bechet, DVDs for HUM 223

The website is called Cultural Equity and it contains links to a lot of Alan Lomax' work ... a welter of stuff ...

I surfed into it inadvertently, when I was Googling early jazz clarinet master Sidney Bechet and found what has to be the best online biography of the man. [See note on Bechet below.] But the website itself is something that merits further study. From the "about" page:

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), at the Fine Arts Campus of New York City's Hunter College, was chartered as a charitable organization in the State of New York in 1983. It was founded by Alan Lomax as a center for the exploration and preservation of the world's expressive traditions. 

MISSION
ACE's mission is to facilitate cultural equity, the right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage. Cultural equity is the end result of collecting, archiving, repatriating, and revitalizing the full range and diversity of the expressive traditions of the world's people — stories, music, dance, cooking, costume. Alan Lomax hoped that cultural equity would become one of the fundamental principles of human rights and made it the keystone of own career. He used an approach to research and public use he called cultural feedback, which is intended to provide equity for the people whose music and oral traditions were until recently unrecorded and unrecognized. ACE realizes its mission through a configuration of feedback projects that creatively use and expand upon Alan Lomax's collected works and research on music and other forms of expressive culture. These include:

• The digitization of a vast majority of Alan Lomax's media and scholarly files in an evolving website which is open to the public.
• The commercial distribution of sound and video recordings from Lomax's collections linked to the payment of royalties to the original performers or their descendants.
• The repatriation of media collections to libraries situated in the areas where they were collected.
• Making the research paradigms, findings, and data of Lomax's Performance Style & Culture research accessible to musicologists, movement specialists, and evolutionary anthropologists.

Also on the website links to recordings and videos, Including two DVDs from the American Patchwork series that would be perfect for the blues course in the fall:

• The Land Where the Blues Began
  Produced in 1979 with the support of Mississippi Educational Television, Alan Lomax, John Bishop, & Worth Long explore the enduring African-American performance traditions of the Mississippi Delta. Featuring bluesmen R. L. Burnside and Jack Owens; tall-tale tellers, fife and drum bands, and diddley-bow players; and former prisoners, railroad workers, and roustabouts singing field hollers, work chants, and levee camp songs. This DVD is a 1990 re-edit of the original program for inclusion in the American Patchwork series. An expanded version of the original is being prepared for DVD. [$24.95]
  
• Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now
  A celebration of New Orleans' musical culture — from its piano bars and barrelhouses to brass bands and street parades, with their colorful, riotous, and symbolic second lines, in which the community plays an essential part in the performance. Shot in the thick of funeral parades and nightclubs, with performances by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Danny Barker, Feet Don't Fail Me Now tells the story of New Orleans' utterly unique and valuable jazz heritage. [$24.95]

A note on how Bechet's name is pronounced (which I also surfed into), linked here so I don't forget it and/or lose it. From an aside in the [London] Independent, "... Louis Armstrong's great contemporary Sidney Bechet was pronounced in the French style by the Americans (As Sidney Beshay) but the French, wishing to say things in the American style, assumed that the Americans had got it wrong as usual and called him Sidney Beshette." Miles Kington, "The strange case of Dr Jeekyll and Mr Lewis, The Independent, Dec 28, 1994  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19941228/ai_n14864921/ If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt it, it is significant because Bechet spent so much of his career in France.