In the mid-1940s, Elizabeth Cotten (1895-1987) chanced to meet composer Ruth Crawford Seeger at a department store. They began to talk, and Seeger soon hired Cotten to work in the Seeger household.... more

Reagon writes, "My history was wrapped carefully for me by my fore-parents in the songs of the church, the work fields, and the blues. Ever since this discovery I've been trying to find myself, using... more

The McIntosh County Shouters, 1993 recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, are known for their compelling fusion of dance, call-and-response singing, and... more

Alabama farm worker Dock Reed and his cousin Vera Hall Ward were both recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Dock, by all accounts, was a deeply religious man who never sang secular... more

From the streets of New York City comes a medley of musical styles that represents the cultural and musical diversity of the Big Apple. Recorded between the spring of 1950 and fall of 1957 by famed... more

In 1964, after five winters living and working with the people of the Sea Islands of South Carolina (helping with adult literacy programs and recording singing traditions), musician and musicologist... more

The New Harmony Sisterhood Band, formed in the mid-seventies from among students at the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate School for Social Change, draws on the folk idiom for style, and the women's... more

American folklorist Harold Courlander compiled this series (Negro Folk Music of Alabama) from the recordings he made in rural Alabama in 1950. The album is an attempt to counter the stereotypes of... more