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Alan Lomax hardly owned the copyright on pre-rock ethnography. As this wonderfully personal four-disc box set rather copiously illustrates, the fine art of field recording is an avocation many young Americans aspired to in the late 1950s and ’60s. This was the era that gave rise to Bob Dylan and the folk revival—archly spoofed in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There—and first saw a Columbia University student named Art Rosenbaum begin recording musicians on road trips to the Midwest and Kentucky hills.
A full half century later, Rosenbaum (now an art professor at the University of Georgia in Athens) is still at it. Compiled by the Atlanta-based archive specialists Dust-to-Digital, the survey of blues, country, gospel, bluegrass and numerous other old-timey tangents captures the voice of America in full flower. The selection is rigorously unorthodox, dispensing with chronological flow, or much in the way of retrofitted themes: It’s just a lot of majestic, scrappy, raw, vibrant, crusty, sad and soulful musicians doing what they do with fiddles, banjos, harmonicas, guitars and harmony choirs. They call down Satan, chase blue-eyed girls, shout jubilee and go down that road feeling bad.
Rosenbaum, whose annotations, paintings and photography fill a 98-page booklet, ties it all together with his casual observations, which invite the listener to engage an extraordinary world of sound that is still very much alive and rocking the house.
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