Customer Reviews

Southern Journey, Vol. 1: Voices From The American South - Blues, Ballads, Hymns, Reels, Shouts, Chanteys And Work Songs

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Truth be told this disc is not for everyone and I hope that this description will help those interested in hearing the ancestors of many major music forms find a good listen. Alan Lomax made an attempt to record the provincial musical styles in their home and on the participants own terms. What you get are real individuals singing and playing instruments for reasons that no longer exist today; to pass the day at work, to pass along local stories and traditions, to pass the time in jail, to provide expression for small communities, and to praise their gods where the lived and breathed. There was not a dollar to be made for any performance on this disc, and though we pay to hear it now, it had an effect on the musicians and singers. This music is not polished but it is a fantastic cd based on its content and not its production value. You won't hear music like this often in your life.

I've played this CD over and over and still love every minute of it. The music is so varied, so beautiful. I now want to get other albums recorded by Alan Lomax, a genius for recognizing and recording great music. Highly recommended for anyone who loves uncommercial melodies and pure voices.

I have spent a fair amount of time recently reviewing, individually and on various artist compilations, performers from the 1960's urban folk revival. You know Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt and the like. I have also reviewed the earlier performers who influenced them on the more traditional folk side like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. There was another component of that search for roots that entailed heading south to the Mississippi Delta, the Georgia Sea Islands, and the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia to get `religion' on the rural roots musical scene.

I mentioned in a review of the performers who influenced the 1960's urban folk scene that those efforts did not fall from the sky but had been transmitted by earlier performers. That, my friends, applies as well to the search for roots music. I also mentioned that we all, later when we understood things better, appreciated that John and Allan Lomax (here in this many-volumed series carrying on his father's work in the late 1950's) did yeomen's service to roots music by their travels into the hinterlands in the 1930's and 1940's (and had Pete Seeger tag along for a year and thus serve as a little transmission belt to the latter generation) to find blues, mountain music and other types of American traditional music. Most of us got our country blues infusion second-hand through our addiction to local coffeehouses and the performers who provided us entertainment. The performers we listened to, in turn, learned their material from the masters who populate this CD.

This CD contains a nice assortment of Georgia Sea Island tunes, wage work songs, prisoner work songs and some of the most interesting simple religious music I have heard in a while. I would note in regard to that last point the version of "Beulah Land" done by John Davis and Bessie Jones (who also stands out on other selections here); Sidney Carter's "Pharaoh" and, by far my favorite, The Thornton Old Regular Baptist Church Congregation's "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah". A few centuries ago during the Protestant Reformation or a little later during the English Revolution in England I would have heartily joined in on this one.

Context context context. The number of Southern Journey discs you own affects the way you'll think about the series as a whole. One of my problems with the series has always been the repeats. The Deep River of Song series has no repeats and each disc is more focused. I wish that were the route taken by Southern Journey.

On this site, the whole series looks to be out of print but Rounder still lists the discs so I'd look into that. If it turns out the series is out of print and tracking it down is a hassle, this would be one of the better 1 or 2 discs to get because it's essentially a survey of much of the rest of the series. You get worksongs, mountain ballads, lined-out hymnody, Sacred Harp and Georgia Sea Islanders. Saints, sinners and old inbetweeners.

Recorded in 1959 and '60 by blacks and whites, you'll slip into the rhythm of the chain gang on Dollar Mamie (a personal favorite), and who knows, maybe you'll get saved by Rev. Crenshaw & congregation's epochal I Wonder Will We Meet Again, a serious slice of mightyMighty Black Church music.

If you're coming to this specifically for the bigger names, Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith or Bessie Jones, my ears and money say they're better served elsewhere...

Almeda - Southern Journey, Vol. 7: Ozark Frontier - Ballads And Old-Timey Music From Arkansas,
Hobart - In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes (this is incredible. One of my all-time favorites.)
Bessie - Southern Journey, Vol. 12: Georgia Sea Islands - Biblical Songs And Spirituals, Southern Journey, Vol. 13: Earlist Times - Georgia Sea Island Songs For Everyday Living

Ike Caudhill & congregation's lined-out hymnody on Guide Me O' Thou Great Jehovah, Dollar Mamie by prison inmates and I Wonder Will We Meet Again by Rev. Crenshaw & congregation are the drop you dead-in-your-tracks tracks here. In all the years I've owned this, one still haunts, one still moves, one still sanctifies. One of the problems with the series here? This Guide Me O' Thou is edited. It's 3 minutes shorter than the full one on Southern Journey, Vol. 6: Sheep, Sheep, Don'tcha Know The Road? - Southern Music, Sacred And Sinful. God bless the full one.

This short review is about the entire series of CDs in 'Southern Journey'(this particular CD being the first in the series). Every CD in this large Alan Lomax collection of roots music is worth having. This set is quite literally the foundation on which every American music style is based - with perhaps the exception of American 'show tunes'. These are, of course, early recordings put on reel to reel in the field wherever the artists were found. Although these recordings have been re-recorded (and often borrowed from) many times over the years, these original recordings are (even though they are enjoyable recordings) not something that the average listener is going to be playing all the time.