Deep River of Song: Mississippi - Saints and Sinners

Alan Lomax

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 17, 1999)
• Original Release Date: August 17, 1999
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Rounder Select
• ASIN: B00000JMD3
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #203,344 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
The field recordings made from 1936 to 1942 for the Library of Congress by John and Ruby Lomax, with their son Alan, showed that much of America's finest music and poetry have come from far beyond the entertainment and publishing industries. In the case of these stirring selections from the Lomax archives, among this country's richest cultural resources was the black population enslaved on southern plantations and penal farms. Evident here are echoes of lost worlds--the eerie sounding call of a Mississippi ferryman, the mystery of Charlie Butler's stunning "Diamond Joe," and the fierce spirituality of "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down" by Reverend C.H. Savage and congregation. Most extraordinary are the performances by Sid Hemphill, who Alan Lomax said was his greatest discovery. Playing the ancient pre-harmonica quills or panpipes, whooping with primal fervor, his ingenious "Emmaline, Take Your Time" anticipates Hemphill's unreleased fife-and-drum masterpiece, "The Devil's Dream." --Alan Greenberg

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars essential music for String Band and Blues and more, November 14, 2005

By	Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This is essential music for anyone looking into the traditions of African American music, whether string band, blues, or whatever.

There is so much heritage and so much of the traditional rhythms that have since been smothered out of Black churck music in the interventing years on the religious tunes. There are several of the old Church Rocks and preaching as musical as any song or dance here.

As a string band musician on banjo, guitar, and fiddle, I naturally gravitate to the superb music of Sid Hemphill, Lucius Smith and Will Head in Sledge Mississippi (btw this is the Mississippi Cotton Pickin town that Black CW star Charlie Pride grew up in and wrote the song about). Hemphill is fantastic as a fiddle and a quiller, and this band has a distinct rhythm that no other string band matches.

It should be noted that on the same day that Lomax recorded these string band selections, he recorded a number of selections by the same group playing in a band with quill or fife and drum. You can hear these if you get a copy of the "Traveling Through the Jungle" collection of Black drum band recordings.

It is a shame that nobody has bothered to put all the recordings Lomax and other did of Sid Hemphill, Lucius Smith and their various band mates in 1941 and 1942 and in the 1950s out on one CD and one has to gather different CDS to find them, for example more string band music by this group appears (misplaced in) this series's Black Appalachia recording even though these people were from the hill country of Mississippi and nowhere near Appalachia. Still other string band recordings and solo work by Hemphill and Smith are on David Evan's superb collection, Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi. If you are into banjo Evans collection's booklet, a treasure for anyone into African American traiditional music in its own right, has a great explanation of Smith's banjo style.