Nel luglio del 1954 Alan Lomax arrivava in Italia con l'intento di fissare su nastro magnetico la straordinaria varietà e bellezza delle musiche della tradizione popolare italiana. Sette mesi di lavoro di ricerca sul campo e oltre duemila registrazioni raccolte: un vero e proprio viaggio di scoperta, dal nord al sud della penisola, a fianco del grande collega italiano Dietro Carpitella. Appassionato di fotografia, Lomax documentò l'inchiesta con numerosi scatti. Questo libro è una selezione di oltre duecento fotografie, commentate dalle parole dello stesso Lomax tratte dai suoi saggi, dai taccuini di viaggio e dalle trasmissioni radiofoniche condotte alla BBC.

Alan Lomax iniziò a registrare le canzoni folk dei braccianti afroamericani negli anni trenta, insieme al padre John. L'attrezzatura era rudimentale e fissava il suono su dischi in alluminio della durata di pochi minuti per lato. Solo in un secondo momento subentrarono i dischi in acetato di maggiore durata, che permisero di documentare funzioni religiose o narrazioni della tradizione orale. Guadagnandosi poco a poco la fiducia di questa gente, Lomax immortalò la voce di personaggi leggendari come Leadbelly, Big Bill Bronzey o Vera Hall. Inoltre approfondì lo studio e la comparazione di queste testimonianze, dimostrando come la tradizione musicale africana fosse sopravvissuta praticamente immutata in America.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a rollicking memoir of the legendary folklorist's journey into blues country, with a new companion CD from Rounder Records. In an exciting new collaboration, The New Press, Rounder Records, and the Alan Lomax Archive present an unprecedented opportunity to explore the history of the blues. The innovative book-and-CD set combines Lomax's award-winning The Land Where the Blues Began, along with a specially produced companion compact disc containing blues masterpieces. The Land Where the Blues Began is Lomax's 'singingly well-written cornbread-and-moonshine odyssey' (Kirkus Reviews) across America's musical heartland. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax's 'discerning reconstructions...give life to a domain most of us can never know...one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread' (The New York Times Book Review).

When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.

The chosen semi-discrete approach of a reduction procedure of partial differential equations to ordinary differential equations and finally to difference equations gives the book its distinctiveness and provides a sound basis for a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts in computational fluid dynamics.

Jean Ritchie is the best known and most respected singer of traditional ballads in the United States. It has been nearly thirty years since she originally published Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, and the music found here tells the story of the 'Singing Ritchie Family' at a time when railroads, coal mines, and hillbilly radio were making their first incursions into the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
Built upon a foundation of balladry inherited from old-world Scotland, the family's repertoire was certainly eclectic but not haphazard. The Child ballads, lyric folksongs, play party or frolic songs, Old Regular Baptist lined hymns, Native American ballads, 'hant' songs, and carols brought together in this collection were assembled by family members who actively sought out fragments of tunes and completed them by adding or embellishing verses and melodies.
This new edition has faithfully retained all seventy-seven line scores of the songs and added four new ones, Loving Hannah, Lovin' Henry, Her Mantle So Green, and The Reckless and Rambling Boy. The original headnotes and photographs tell the history of the song as well as how it became a part of the family's life. Chords are indicated for accompaniment; however, music notation and the printed word can present only a reasonable facsimile of any actual song. Jean's singing is simply the best guide to how the song should be sung, so a new audiography and videography have been added to this edition.

In 1942 a young railway enthusiast and radio buff was caught up in the troubles in Singapore. Put to work on the 'Railway of Death', the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma, he was brutally tortured and emotionally destroyed by his experiences

Song and dance style--viewed as nonverbal communications about culture--are here related to social structure and cultural history. Patterns of performance, theme, text and movement are analyzed in large samples of films an recordings from the whole range of human culture, according to the methods explained in this volume. Cantometrics, which means song as a measure of man, finds that traditions of singing trace the main historic distributions of human culture and that specific traits of performance are communications about identifiable aspects of society. The predictable and universal relations between expressive communication and social organization, here established for the first time, open up the possibility of a scientific aesthetics, useful to planners.

Alan Lomax is Director, Cantometrics and Choreometrics Projects at Columbia University.