·•· Exhibits

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Work Songs

An exhibit devoted to work songs in the Lomax collections, by which we refer to songs sung to assist in or accompany actual jobs of work. These songs rhythmically measure or manage the tasks at hand; they direct, exhort, or encourage fellow laborers…

Go to Sleepy Little Baby

The Lomaxes recorded lullabies all over the world, creating a record of the universality of these particularly intimate moments between parents and children.  In this exhibit, we’re presenting some of our favorite lullabies from the collection…

Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: Texas, 1939

Between 1933 and 1946, John A. Lomax made some 80 hours of recordings in the state of Texas, his home state. It’s a massive amount of material, reflecting an extraordinary diversity of vernacular traditions, and featuring the first and last…

Carnival in Trinidad

When Alan Lomax and the Tobagonion folklorist J. D. Elder visited Trinidad in the Spring of 1962, the island’s independence from Great Britain was just months away and Trinidadians were swept up in a joyful spirit of expectation and national pride.…

1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh

This celebration of the 70th anniversary of the seminal 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh, and Alan Lomax’s hugely influential recording of it, is made by Ewan McVicar with the help of many folk of Scotland’s traditional song community…

Trouble Won't Last Always

Trouble Won’t Last Always was a daily song series launched in 2020 in the early months of the pandemic, featuring recordings from the Lomax collections that spoke to themes of loneliness, isolation, optimism, endurance, transcendence. Made…