Southern History Roundup

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"Mississippi Blues trail curriculum launched today," Clarion Ledger, May 6, 2013

A new Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum launched online today will bring the state’s native arts and culture to the classroom by exploring Mississippi history through a Blues Trail lens.

The free 18-lesson curriculum, with an interactive, multi-media resource page, was launched by the Mississippi Arts Commission Monday. With three lessons for each of six core areas — music, meaning, cotton, transportation, civil rights and media — the curriculum is available at www.msbluestrail.org/curriculum.>>>

Jakob Schiller, "Civil War Lovers Can’t Leave the Past Behind at Awkward Reenactments," Wired, May 30, 2013

Some of our favorite photographers are ones that bring a fresh eye to a stale topic, which is what Anderson Scott has done with Civil War re-enactors — a favorite subject among photographers. In his recent photo book Whistling Dixie, Scott delves into the American South with a dirty aesthetic and an eye for the strange.

But just like his photos defy our expectations, the events themselves actually caught him by surprise. Scott, a lawyer in Atlanta, was raised in the South, but years spent documenting the Civil War reenactment scene revealed a group of staunch Confederate supporters among the history buffs and hobbyists.>>>

The Day the Archives Walked in the Door

Eric B. Schultz

Alan Lomax (left) with Richard Queen of Soco
Junior Square Dance Team at the Mountain
Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina,
mid century. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I loved Randall’s latest post, which mixed music and archives, and reminded me how tricky it can be to capture and preserve historic “sound.”  It also brought to mind the story of Alan Lomax (1915-2002), one of America’s great music folklorists and archivists.  From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was a director in the newly-formed Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress, eventually collecting and preserving thousands of important and unique field recordings.

In 1938, Lomax sat Jelly Roll Morton (Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe 1890-1941) down in a small auditorium at the Library and asked him if he knew how to play “Alabama Bound.”  Morton was in the twilight of his career, many years removed from his formative days in New Orleans, and prone to invention—including a birthday that made him old enough to have, as he proclaimed, “invented jazz.”  Lomax was skeptical of Morton in particular and of jazz in general, which he saw at the time as a destructive force threatening to overwhelm his beloved American folk music.