Our Singing Country - A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs

Two hundred songs taken down from the people who actually sang them - in prison yards, church halls, cotton fields and lumber camps - by the father and son who built America's folk song archive.

A sequel to American Ballads and Folk Songs, Our Singing Country holds what John A. Lomax and his son Alan brought home from the recording trips they made for the Library of Congress. The material is arranged in six groups: religious songs, social songs, men at work, outlaws, hollers and blues, and the gang songs of the levee and the prison camps. Nearly every song is printed with a melody transcribed straight from the discs.

John A. Lomax (1867-1948) had been collecting cowboy songs in Texas since before the First World War; with Alan he made thousands of field recordings across the United States in the 1930s, and between them they put more vernacular American singing on record than anyone before or since. This second volume is the more scholarly of the two - a headnote for every performer and place, a serious musical text, and a great deal of material that had never been printed anywhere.

This edition features:

• Around two hundred songs, most of them never printed before, drawn from Library of Congress discs
• Six sections: religious songs, social songs, men at work, outlaws, hollers and blues, gang songs
• Melodies transcribed directly from the field recordings by the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger
• Headnotes naming the performer, the place a song was collected and the date it was taken down
• A period bibliography with full indexes of song titles and first lines for quick reference