Track 22 – “Wondrous Love” by Pine Mountain Girls’ Octet &

Track 23 – “Pretty Polly” by Locust Grove Octet

The Louisville trio Maiden Radio—Cheyenne Marie Mize, Julia Purcell, and Joan Shelley—took the reins on gathering a contemporary octet of Kentucky women, inviting Linda Jean Stokley and Montana Hobbs of the Local Honeys, Heather Summers and Anna Krippenstapel of the Other Years, and Sarah Wood to join them. They recorded their version at Louisville’s Locust Grove in August 2017. The text—past the first two verses—is a composite of their own. 

Track 10 – “Camp Nelson Blues” by Booker Orchestra

The music made by the Booker Orchestra of Camp Nelson, Kentucky, has been almost completely obscured by time. In that distinction, it’s representative of many of the contributions made, to the Commonwealth and to the country alike, by rural black Kentuckians. Jessamine County’s Camp Nelson was a major site for recruitment and training of African-American soldiers in the Civil War, and more than ten thousand United States Colored Troops and their families cycled through during and after the war.

One of my tasks as curator of the Alan Lomax Archive is to manage its YouTube channel. Several years ago, I noticed a particular strain of commentary recurring on the five clips that compose the recorded output of an utterly obscure and equally affecting singer-guitarist named Belton Sutherland, whom Lomax met in rural Madison County, Mississippi, in 1978.

Bessie Jones nurtured a prodigious repertoire of songs—hundreds of them, for work, play, worship, instruction—as both a rite and as a vocation. Her vision was one of radical egalitarianism, inspired by the enduring collective, expressive folk traditions—occupational, recreational, spiritual—of the black rural South and her ardent faith in a kind of ecstatic liberation theology, which found activist application in the civil rights movement.

Cajun records of this vintage are among the rarest and most sought after among collectors. Let Me Play This For You: Rare Cajun Music, 1929–1930, assembled by Ron Brown and Christopher King (two of the world’s foremost collectors of Cajun 78s) for the Tompkins Square label, is essential for anyone who appreciates French-speaking Louisiana’s old-time songs and tunes.

Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917–1927) is a collaboration between the Revenant label and Third Man Records, and has been released roughly 80 years after Paramount, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. It’s been looming near me for some months now, demanding much of my attention, and getting it, with its opulent enormity.

On April 28, Dust-to-Digital released No More Good Time In The World For Me, a two-CD set of Bruce Jackson’s recordings of J.B. Smith. Revisit producer Nathan Salsburg’s article about Smith and his work songs, from our Texas music issue.

An installment of "Against Authenticity," an OA symposium: Nathan Salsburg talks Alan Lomax, MTV, Jelly Roll Morton, and the whatever hold "purity" has at all in our conversations about culture.

Texas Island isn’t an island, nor is it in Texas. It’s a vague peninsula around which wraps Moon Lake, an oxbow formed by an abandoned meander of the Mississippi River, twenty miles north of Clarksdale off Highway 61, near the hamlet of Lula.