Conference Agenda

In 1933, John and Alan Lomax traveled across the US South, hunting for Black folksongs to record for preservation in the Library of Congress. The “purest” of these, they posited, could be found in segregated plantation-penitentiaries. Scholars have addressed the conflicting priorities between the duo across their careers (Filene 2000), as well as among the Lomaxes and their interlocutors (Stone 2019). Underexamined, however, are the disjunct temporal currents of the archive: on one hand, the Lomaxes’ conception of Black folksongs as memory relics of an Old Southern past; and, on the other, imprisoned musicians’ use of folksongs to articulate the multiplicitous temporality of Black fugitivity.

This paper listens across several registers of the archive, analyzing research notes and correspondence in the Lomaxes’ papers alongside the musical, lyrical, and historical details of the recordings themselves. First, I lay out the relationship between folksong and memory in the Lomaxes’ fieldwork methods and recording practices. Together with their published writings, these findings show that John Lomax in particular relied on the carceral logics of the plantation-penitentiary in his efforts to preserve the pastness of Black folksongs—what he called their “strange primitive beauty”—by isolating them from modern commercial, white, or educational influences. This impulse resonates within a larger history of folksong collecting before its socio-functional turn, as well as within contemporary cultural criticism by Southern conservatives. Second, I respond to Daphne Brooks’s invitation to “listen to the dense history of the carceral state” (2021) by closely attending to two versions of the same folksong, “Long Gone” and “Long John,” recorded at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas. Through musical repetition and confounding imagery—including “funny shoes” that face two directions at once—musicians like “Lightning” Washington used song to retrace mythic histories of escaped convicts, bring those histories sensibly into the present, and imagine their own eventual fugitive flights out of the prison. Ultimately, by drawing out the temporal tension in the Lomax archive, I critically re-evaluate recordings at the heart of the 1930s American folksong canon and demonstrate the fundamental role of music in mediating felt experiences of time in the Jim Crow South.