Cultural exploration is a tricky business. If you make “discoveries,” you are really just creating a new context for something that already existed before you came along to slap a frame on it. John and Alan Lomax were fearless and problematic practitioners of that exact trade, wading through the backwaters and hill countries of the U.S. and beyond under the auspices of various government programs, attempting to craft a narrative about humanity through the rustic, traditional songs they collected and delivered to the masses in the early part of the 1900s.
The cultural record the Lomaxes collected was intended to create a musical genealogy, describing who we are and how we got here. In Louisiana, we understand that the present and the past commingle in song, a fact deftly demonstrated in Valcour Records’ I Wanna Sing Right: Rediscovering Lomax in the Evangeline Country, a collection of contemporary Louisiana musicians placing their own spin on some of the songs the Lomaxes documented in Louisiana.
The four EPs in this series will become available quarterly, each exploring its own theme. The first, Bad Boys and Good Men, opens with “Le Garçon Sans Soucis” (The Carefree Boy), sung by T’Monde’s Megan Brown and featuring the violin and bouzouki of Valcour’s Joel Savoy. The song’s rich lilt feels like history and love unfolding in one timeless sweep, which is what this boxed set purports to do: demonstrate that the tunes unearthed by the Lomaxes are not just anthropological relics, but living songs by actual people telling stories that stand the test of time.
Claire Caffery’s take on “Batson,” an extended blues saga of a boy accused of murder, was originally captured by the Lomaxes in 1934 from Wilson “Stavin’ Chain” Jones; but it still feels chillingly current as he cries, “Mama, I didn’t do the crime,” led nevertheless to his inevitable lethal sentence. Caffery’s version is delivered in rich, vintage tones, whereas “Inch Above Your Knee,” sung by Feufollet’s Kelli Jones-Savoy, is rocked up into a bar-band come-on, soaking up beer and sex under neon blue lights.
It is almost meaningless to ask which of these contemporary versions is more authentic; each is delivered to highlight the songs’ best characteristics. For the traditionalist, Michael Doucet’s version of “La Chanson de Théogène Dubois” might seem a more fitting arrangement for a Lomax-derived record, yet this cautionary tale is just as timeless as “Inch Above Your Knee.” Parents warn children about sex; children seek it out anyway. It’s been a subject, maybe the subject, of songs long before the Lomaxes lugged their recording equipment into the swamp.
Then and now come together best in Dirk Powell’s “The Waco Girl,” a traditional drinking ballad given a Led Zeppelin levee-breaking heaviness in its production. It’s the tale of a Berkshire, England, murder that traveled with Irish immigrants to a Crowley singer named Eddie Murphy, to the Lomaxes, and now to us. The point of the tune is two-fold: that the lives and deaths of real people carry on in stories and that we should be ready when those stories are handed off to us.
If the three forthcoming volumes of this set are like the first, this magnificent body of songs will continue to thrive.
