| |
 |
 |
| |
Take this hammer
Take it to the captain
Tell him I’m gone
Tell him I’m gone
If he asks you if I was running
Tell him I was flying
If he asks you if I was laughing
Tell him I was crying |
|
|
 |
Lead Belly was born in Lousiana somewhere around 1888. Living the often violent life of an itinerate musician he found himself twice imprisoned for murder. In 1933 his reputation reached the Lomax family, who, after no small personal tragedy of their own, were travelling the Southern states, recording American work songs, ballads and blues in prisons, penitentiaries, and brothels. Moving around the country in their Ford sedan, John, and his sons John Jr. and Alan, set about recording such artists as Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton.
They came across Lead Belly in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and with their state-of-the-art acetate disc recorder they cut several sides together over the next few months. They soon parted ways; Lead Belly to a fifteen year career as a solo artist, and the Lomax’s continuing their collection of folk musics for the archives of the Library of Congress, and the Works Progress Administration. |
|
|
Despite the undoubtable problematic of the relationship between the academic Lomax’s and the hard-living blues artist, it is through this short-lived collaboration that Lead Belly’s work reached a wider audience, of which I count myself a part.
My father, following a period of time working in the Caribbean after leaving school in 1964, had become interested in what was still at that time called ‘negro music’. A Presto vinyl record (PRE 689, 1965) containing a selection of Lead Belly’s early Lomax recordings, is one of the earliest artefacts of any kind that I remember from my childhood. |
| |
|
|
Much of my work as a sound artist has been resolutely iconoclastic. For this project, I was interested in engaging with a populist folk tradition, in the hope such a strategy would enable me to think about field recording and acousmatic soundscape composition in a new way.
The sound material selected, was by necessity, lo-fi (A short promotional film made by Lomax and Leadbelly, found on YouTube). The surface noise in the piece, the glitches, and crackles, are, if not intentional, interesting to me. The piece was entirely constructed from Lead Belly’s voice and signature 12-string guitar. The question that remains for me is.. |
|
|
|
Can a sound artist sing the blues?
Keywords:
cantometrics, field recording, archives, folklore, murder, violence, destruction, heritage, race, recorded sound, transformation, dematerialisation, digitisation, vinyl, tragedy, prison, blues, surface noise, work, masculinity.
Many thanks to Benji Fox for the invitation to participate in this project, and all the efforts he made to bring us all together.
|
| Download Mp3 |
|
|
|
 |
