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Film and Video


From 1978 to 1983, Alan Lomax and a video-crew travelled through the American South and Southwest, documenting its traditional music — brass bands, second-liners, and Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans; miners, moonshiners, and Primitive Baptists in Kentucky; flat-footers, string bands, and Piedmont blues in North Carolina; Cajun cowboys, fiddlers, and zydeco stompers in French-speaking Louisiana; and fife-and-drum ensembles, gospel quartets, former railroad track-liners, levee-camp muleskinners, and players on the pre-war blues circuit in Mississippi; and vernacular music and material culture among Mexican American communities and the Tohono O'odham, Yacqui, and Mountain Apache in Arizona. This footage ultimately totaled some 350 hours and was edited into Lomax's "American Patchwork" series, which aired on American public television in 1991. But given the strictures of the form, hundreds of discrete performances, narrative segments, and compelling scenes were left unseen. We have labored to make as much of this raw footage available as possible through the Alan Lomax Archive YouTube channel, originally drawing on low-resolution clips output from reference DVDs (now utterly obsolete), and more recently, new digital transfers made by the Library of Congress from the original 3/4" video-tapes. We continue to create and upload these clips as media and time allows.

Carriacou 1991

American Patchwork

Smithsonian Folklife Festival 1983

Ballads, Blues and Bluegrass

Newport Folk Festival 1966

Oss Oss Wee Oss! 1953

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