- published: 27 Apr 2016
- views: 16
Appalachian may refer to:
Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. During the New Deal, with his father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture. With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, The Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 80s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.
I'd like to hike the appalachian
I've tossed it around in my mind
But then I say to myself
Boy you must be crazy
Don't you know you'll never have the time
I'd like to go into the city
Maybe travel for a while
Hitch a ride, now there's something I can do
But I've never been more than a mile
And it might take forever
But I am all I have to show
There is a missing piece
To find before I go
Three words away from a masterpiece
Ten thousand miles from my home
And all my greed
And three hungry mouths to feed
I don't know if I can make it on my own
And yet it's raining up on sharp top
My spirit's molding me like clay
I guess we should have built further from the river bank
It's trying to wash us all away
And it might take forever
But we are all we have to show
There is a missing piece
To find before we go
This morning's battle, population
On the city street below
And lord I dread to get up out of bed
Five million footprints in the snow
And it might take forever
But I am all I have to show
There is a missing piece