Alan Lomax Spent Years Traveling the Country to Record the Sounds of America. The Legacy of His Obsession Will Live Forever

By letting Muddy Waters hear himself for the first time, he unlocked a new confidence that set the sharecropper on the path to superstardom. And that’s just the start of what he found in churches, prisons and even lumberjack camps

Illustrations by Tim O'Brien

Summer 2026

Lomax hit the road in search of as many folk traditions as he could discover. “Folk music,” he wrote, “blooms hard by the crossroads.” Illustration by Tim O'Brien

1. Mississippi: A Prequel

On a small, grass-covered plot next to a quiet country road a few miles northwest of Clarksdale, Mississippi, stands a plaque identifying “Muddy Waters’s House.” The blues pioneer “lived most of his first thirty years at a house on this site,” it proclaims. The third sentence (of four in total) further notes: “Muddy Waters was first recorded here in 1941 by Alan Lomax, who was compiling songs for the Library of Congress.”

That was the kind of thing Alan Lomax did. In August 1941, Lomax was traveling across northern Mississippi with some companions, busy doing the work that would make him the 20th century’s most famous musical folklorist—searching out and capturing for posterity the rich, wild, undiscovered diversity of expression through music and song to be found across this country. When his inquiries brought him to this house on the primarily cotton-growing Stovall Plantation, the house’s 28-year-old occupant—whose real name was McKinley Morganfield, though he also went by “Muddy Water” (the “s” would come later)—earned his living driving a tractor, with a sideline bootlegging ditch-bank whiskey. He had a solid local reputation as a fine singer and guitarist, but no prospective full-time career in music. After Waters agreed to perform some songs in his front room, as requested, Lomax played back the recording, captured on the 16-inch discs of a Presto recording machine, there and then.

Trunk of Car — John Lomax, Alan’s father, was a folklorist inspired by frontier ballads he heard growing up in rural Texas. By the 1930s, John and Alan were driving across the South with recording equipment in their trunk on behalf of the Library of Congress. Library of Congress

Waters had never heard himself sing, and he would later explain how hearing himself as he’d heard other musicians on the local jukebox changed something. “Man,” he reflected, “you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon, when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.” Though nearly two years would pass before Waters would quit his job and head north to Chicago, this was when the seed was sown. “I can do it,” he told himself. “I can do it.”

For Waters, it was a pivotal moment. For Lomax, no matter the historical resonance this encounter would come to have, it was one more satisfactorily productive Saturday afternoon. By the next morning, Lomax and his co-workers would be recording a baptism service at Calvary Baptist Church in the town of Money; later on, they’d capture songs of the evening service at the Church of God in Christ on the Mohead Plantation, near Lula. Sunday would be at least as typical of what Lomax did as Saturday.

In hindsight, Lomax is sometimes spoken of as though he was some kind of supremely successful talent scout, but although he would play significant roles in many careers, including some celebrated ones—in addition to Waters, he was involved in one way or another with Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, Pete Seeger, Son House, Aunt Molly Jackson and Mississippi Fred McDowell—his core aim and priority as he explored America, recording equipment at the ready, was something else entirely. No single magazine article could convey the full range of what he recorded—a partial online database of documentation relating to Lomax’s fieldwork runs to nearly 12,000 pages. But this story, by focusing on three contrasting geographical areas, and what he found in each place, and the ways in which what he recorded there has or has not echoed down the years, hopes to give a deeper sense of his true achievement.

The first locus is in and around the Mississippi Delta, fertile musical territory where Lomax at times did unearth and record the kind of blues pioneers he is often associated with. (Tellingly, he also did plenty else there.) The second is a small region of coastal Georgia where Lomax first went song collecting at the age of 20, then returned many years later. The third is the area of the Upper Midwest leading up from industrial Michigan to isolated islands of the Great Lakes, where Lomax found an eclectic repertoire in a land of lumberjacks and sailors and many different communities from the European diaspora.

Alan Lomax Spent Years Traveling the Country to Record the Sounds of America. The Legacy of His Obsession Will Live Forever — John Lomax (right) with Richard Amerson, an Alabama blues singer and harmonica player, in 1940. Library of Congress

On occasion, what Lomax discovered quickly made its way into public consciousness, but far from everything that he recorded became famous. Some recordings have resonated more deeply as time has passed, others have resurfaced long afterward in unlikely ways, and much of what he collected is still little known. Maybe that is central to his achievement: less the few choice moments that quickly rose up and caught the bright sunlight than the deep and wide reservoir of song, in its full variety of human expression, that is preserved for all time, for historians, musicologists and anyone else curious enough to examine and discover at their leisure.

That same year he first met Muddy Waters, 1941, Lomax gave an interview to the Washington Times Herald, which characterized him as “the boy who today is America’s leading authority on balladeries.” (Lomax was then 26 years old.) Presumably invited to offer the wider rationale for what he was doing, he posited that America had the world’s greatest wealth of songs because of all the cultures colliding and concatenating here, and he gave a sense of his mission. “You learn what Americans have felt in their biggest moments of happiness and despair,” he said. “You realize for the very first time what the true history of this great country is. What America actually stands for. In the future these records will be invaluable, and I am going to keep on collecting.”

2. Beforehand

Improbably, for someone who is rightly regarded as making such a singular mark on the world, when Alan Lomax began collecting songs he was actually going into the family business. In 1906, his father, John Lomax, a member of Texas A&M’s English faculty, took a year’s leave of absence from teaching to attend graduate school at Harvard, where he was encouraged to formalize a childhood passion for the cowboy songs he’d heard growing up in rural Texas. To find examples, the elder Lomax wrote to newspapers across America, asking them to print his appeal for unpublished songs handed down through the oral tradition: “They deal mainly with frontier experiences ... attempts, often crude and sometimes vulgar, to epitomize and particularize the life of the pioneers who peopled the vast region west of the Mississippi River.” He wished, he went on, “to solicit your aid in preserving from extinction this expression of American literature.”

In 1910, the results appeared in a book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Showing the same aim-for-the-sky determination that his son Alan would later exude, John Lomax managed to persuade Theodore Roosevelt to provide the book’s two-page handwritten introduction, something Lomax achieved by turning up at Roosevelt’s hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where they were both in town for a “Frontier Days celebration,” and asking to see the former president. The words Roosevelt wrote for him on the spot spoke of song collecting as safeguarding a vanishing resource. “It is therefore a work of real importance,” Roosevelt wrote, “to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier.”

In the following decades, John Lomax would intermittently pursue this career as a folklorist, which is what led him in the early 1930s to the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song, established in 1928. “Folk,” in this wider use, often wouldn’t refer to what is now considered “folk music”; it would come to mean any distinct music or song specific to a particular part of the population, whether categorized by race, religion, heritage, field of work or its economic, geographical or other localized situation. John Lomax, unimpressed by what the library had so far collected, arranged to conduct field recording trips for it.

That was when his son became involved. In June 1933, when the 65-year-old John Lomax set out on his first Library of Congress sortie across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, he took the 18-year-old Alan with him. By now, song collecting was no longer a matter of only transcribing music and lyrics; it also involved using the earliest hefty but portable recording devices. (Alan Lomax would later claim that his father got hold of the first such device he had directly from Thomas Edison’s widow, though evidence for this seems elusive.)

Within a couple of years, Alan Lomax was off on his own separate song-collecting journeys, and in 1937, at the age of 22, he was hired to work full time for the Library of Congress. His rather quaint formal title was assistant in charge of the archive, but the main part of his job was to travel the country, seeking out songs and those who sang them and urging them to allow him to make recordings.

3. Coastal Georgia

The younger Lomax’s first song-hunting trip without his father took place in the summer of 1935, though he didn’t travel alone, instead enlisting the help of two much older women. One, Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, was a professor at New York University who taught folklore and medieval literature. The second, Zora Neale Hurston, was an anthropologist who had published her first novel the previous year, though the wider acclaim of its follow-up, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was still a couple of years away. Lomax had been impressed by Hurston’s immersive account of Afro-Creole occult, “Hoodoo in America,” and would describe her as “probably the best informed person today on Western Negro folklore.” (Hurston would later note that one of her roles, when working with Lomax, would be “counteracting his tendencies to hasty generalization.”)

John Davis (front, black shirt), whom Lomax first recorded in 1935, with members of the Georgia Sea Island Singers in 1960. Association for Cultural Equity

This somewhat unusual traveling party for 1935—a young white man with two older women, one white, one Black; Hurston, at her apparent suggestion, driving a second car—met on June 15 in Brunswick, Georgia, and for the first leg of their journey headed east to St. Simons Island, a site recommended by Hurston as “crammed with Negro song and lore.” There, they rented a house and sent out word that they were looking for singers. “The first evening,” Lomax reported, “our front yard was crowded.”

They spent the next few days recording. Lomax’s excited inventory, which gives a sense of just how much music could be found in one small, unheralded spot on the map by someone determined enough to find it, included “chanties of the sort that the Negroes sing in loading the ships in Charleston, Savannah and Brunswick ... probably the earliest type of Negro work song”; “ring-shouts, probably the earliest form of the Negro spiritual, widely current in the days of slavery, but now all but forgotten except in a few isolated communities”; an archaic version of a rhythmic guitar technique known as “jooking”; and even “the shrill, strange cries that these children use to signal to each other across the fields.” They also recorded an interview with a man, Wallace Quarterman, who had been born in 1844 and who shared his memories about the transition from slavery after the Civil War.

St. Simons Island was not technically an island, but until 1924 it had been inaccessible by road—“separated,” Lomax would write, “by sea marsh and mangrove swamp.” As such, it was home to independent communities of the formerly enslaved who lived in relative isolation. That was intrinsic to what Lomax believed he was capturing. “We felt when we left St. Simons Island that we had turned back time 40 or 50 years,” he would report, “and heard and recorded some genuine Afro-American folk music of the middle of the 19th century.” Lomax’s most prolific source was John Davis, a guitarist and singer who delivered solo guitar pieces, roughshod harmony singing with friends and storytelling (also, it perhaps should be noted, a song called “Nasty Butt, Stinky Butt”). In the weeks after this visit, Davis wrote Lomax a letter alluding to some suggested joint future plans—“I will be ready to go with you whenever you say”—but, as far as I can tell, they didn’t meet again for 24 years.

In the intervening period, Lomax did plenty else. Lomax was already finding different avenues to explore and proselytize about his passions, including writing, filmmaking and broadcasting, even before his tenure with the Library of Congress effectively ended in 1942. (Later in life, he would also do a great deal of academic theorizing about music and other expressive behavior’s structural and epistemological commonalities across cultures.) In 1950 he moved to Europe: notionally to collect music there, which he did with great energy, though an FBI investigation into possible communist associations may have played its part in both his departure and his staying away. (Lomax was never formally accused of anything.)

Lomax returned to the United States in 1958, and in the summer of 1959, he embarked on what would be his last grand sweep of song-gathering. This time he traveled across the Southern states with his then-partner, the young English folk singer Shirley Collins, and Ampex stereo reel-tape machine recording equipment (a distinct upgrade on anything he’d been able to use before), on what would become known as his “Southern Journey.” After visiting seven states, their penultimate stop was Georgia. Arriving back on St. Simons Island, Lomax sought out Davis—Lomax’s archives contain a photograph he took of Davis smiling on his porch—and recorded him again, this time with a group called the Spiritual Singers of Coastal Georgia.

Among them was a woman who had moved to the islands since his previous visit, Bessie Jones, a remarkable singer whom Lomax would subsequently take under his wing. Two years later, Jones lived for three months with Lomax and his new wife, Toni, at their house in New York, as they recorded Jones’ stories and songs, and he helped push forward her touring career with the group he had heard on the island, now rechristened the Georgia Sea Island Singers. In January 1977, they performed at an inaugural concert for Jimmy Carter, the first president from their state.

Before Jones died in 1984, she made records both with the group and on her own, and her distinctive hybrid of folk and gospel received a fair amount of acclaim. Then, some years later, her voice resurfaced in a different way, one more directly related to Lomax. In 1999, the dance music pioneer Moby released his album Play, which went on to sell 12 million copies. The album made prominent use of historical samples, three of which Moby took directly from a CD set lent to him by a friend—recordings from Lomax’s 1959 travels. The album remains divisive: Did Moby’s sampling represent a deft feat of musical fusion, casting a spotlight on neglected past glories? Or was it an act of opportunistic appropriation, blithely plucking authenticity off the shelf? Either way, the very first voice you hear on the album—“Till my honey come back, sometimes,” from the single “Honey”—is that of Bessie Jones, 40 years earlier, singing into Alan Lomax’s microphone one October evening on the coast of Georgia.

4. Northern Michigan

Sometimes the recordings Lomax made were destined to sit in the archive, waiting to be noticed. Often, aside from the attentions of a few musicologists and academics, they are still waiting. But in their own way, some of these less feted recordings are as important for what they show of Lomax’s ongoing mission and the story he captured. Such could be said of all that Lomax found in the Upper Midwest, and the story of what he did there is one that, even in summary, is quite something to tell.

By 1938, Lomax and his father had between them collected for the Library of Congress rich examples of what might be considered the more obvious regional American music: They had recorded Appalachian folk, the Cajun and Creole traditions of Louisiana, Texan cowboy songs, and all kinds of gospel, blues and work songs, and had also searched widely for disparate traces of African, Mexican, Caribbean and French musical traditions, particularly across the Southern states. Now Lomax set his sights on a summer trip to Michigan, particularly its Upper Peninsula. He explained his forthcoming journey’s rationale in a letter to his seniors at the Library of Congress: “The Archive will be able to record what remains of the once vigorous lumberjack culture, to explore the musical potentialities of the many foreign language groups of that area (Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Gaelic, French-Canadian, etc.) and to observe what have been the results of the mixing of these cultures with the Anglo-American matrix.”

The People He Met Along the Way

Alan Lomax traveled far and wide to record performers of diverse backgrounds and traditions. This is just a sampling of the scores of musicians he met.

He loaded up a car with recording and filmmaking equipment and drove north from Washington. One way of reading the correspondence that exists from the next three months, on a trip that kept being extended, is as a chronicle of desperation and disaster. Lomax was always on the verge of running out of money. A Western Union telegram to home base in Washington simply read: “Please send my advance or voucher or something by wire. I’m not eating.” These money stresses were amplified by the demands of the people he was beseeching to record. Though he did not pay them to perform, he often had to meet other expectations: “Songs in Mich. absolutely require beer,” he explained. Worse, Lomax was robbed at least twice: The recording equipment and his guitar were taken from his parked car in Detroit (he had to wait days for replacement equipment), then, later in the trip, film reels containing several weeks’ worth of footage were stolen. As for the car itself, a Plymouth sedan, Lomax had to pay for new brake linings; the car was “literally falling to pieces,” he reported.

And yet Lomax’s self-ascribed mission clearly possessed him. Even amid adversity, you can feel his enthusiasm for what he called “the most richly varied area for folk music that I had ever visited.” The music was as unfamiliar, and as wide-ranging, as he’d hoped. For instance, in and around Detroit, he found a particularly rich vein of Serbian musicians playing traditional instruments—the diple (a Balkan double-pipe), the duduk (an Armenian double-reed woodwind instrument) and the gusle (a “one-stringed bowed lute”)—detailing with evident pleasure in his notebook that one session of Serbian shepherd’s music had been recorded “in the shadow of the Chrysler plant.” Soon he moved north, away from the bigger cities, where, among many other sources, he found aging lumberjack singers and captured a catalog of songs sung by, and to, men who went into the woods in the fall and didn’t emerge until the spring.

Muscians — Lomax (far right, standing) during a workshop at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966, one of several years he helped program it. That year included a blues “cutting contest,” a fiddle contest and a “gospel battle.” Seated, from left: Kilby Snow, plus two unidentified guests; Christine Brown; Bukka White; Reverend Pearly Brown (with guitar); Howlin’ Wolf; Willard Watson. David Gahr / Getty Images

A couple of weeks in, Lomax took a boat to Beaver Island, in the middle of Lake Michigan, a location with a peculiar and particular history. In the 19th century, native Odawa residents were joined, then largely displaced, by a Mormon community led by its self-styled king, James Jesse Strang. After Strang was assassinated in 1856, the Mormons were driven out, and their place was taken primarily by Irish immigrants. The singers Lomax met were the descendants of that influx, and he recorded as many of their songs as he could: “over a hundred come-all-ye ballads-forecastle, lumberjack, lake sailor, Irish, popular, etc.” he related.

Two weeks later, Lomax hit another rich seam in the community of Newberry—“the toughest little town I have seen in Michigan”—where he recorded 70 more songs, most in a variety of Northern European languages or in their evolved North American dialects. He also came across more lumberjack songs. These were typically working tales of heroism and struggle, but as in many other genres, a particular subset was obscene, often in extremely anatomically specific ways. A singer named Bert Graham offered a song titled “Joe Williams,” which told the tale, in searingly ribald language, of a 21-year-old ox driver who goes into town and catches “the pox,” concluding that he’d have been wiser to stay in the woods in intimate congress with his favorite ox. This, too, Lomax garnered for the government archives.

Lomax kept delaying his return. “I want a chance now that I have explored lumberjacks & lake sailors a bit to take a whack at the miners, the Finns and the French,” he wrote to Washington. He duly did that, recording a significant body of work from the Finnish diaspora. Before finally packing up, after driving 8,400 miles in three months, he declared that there was so much more to find that he planned to return the following summer.

In the end, other priorities edged into place and he would never return. Hundreds of albums have collected music Lomax recorded over the years, but few contain recordings made during this Michigan sojourn. One album, largely based on a subsection of the trip, Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks, was released in 1960, but it’s been long unavailable. About four years ago, someone posted the whole album on YouTube (where you can still hear it for free) and appended a rather despairing note: “No one I’ve shown this record to cares about it in any way, but I think it’s so sick.”

Since the album was posted, it has been listened to less than once a day. But it is there. The whole three months’ worth of music, in fact, sits on the Library of Congress website, a couple of clicks away from anyone inquisitive enough to uncover these preserved moments. All the musicians he recorded are long gone. Many of the microworlds in which he found these songs either are gone too or are changed beyond all recognition. But these recordings will be with us for as long as people have ears to hear them. In the long run, recordings like these—what he captured when few others made the great effort both of action and imagination that was Lomax’s hallmark—may well prove to be the greatest treasure.

Key takeaways: Tracking Alan Lomax's essential early travels

Beginning when he was 18, Lomax crisscrossed the country to make recordings for the Library of Congress, first traveling in 1933 with his father, John Lomax, across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.

By June 1935, on his own for the first time, he recruited two folklorists—Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle—to join him in Florida and Georgia, where he recorded blues music, work songs, ring shouts, children’s field calls, ribald ballads and oral histories from people born before the Civil War.

In 1937 he made recordings in Washington, D.C. and visited Kentucky and Ohio, and the next year, between Washington recording sessions, he traveled to Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New Jersey before clocking 8,400 miles in three months while touring the Upper Midwest, where he captured everything from Balkan folk music to Michigan lumberjack songs and lake sailor tales.

He closed out 1938 in New York City, recording performances and interviews connected to Carnegie Hall’s “Spirituals to Swing” concert as well as sessions with Lead Belly.

5. Mississippi: In Search of Lomax

From everything I’d read, I knew that on St. Simons Island and in places like Beaver Island, there were likely to be few, if any, remnants of what Lomax did. Mississippi promised to be a little different, so I traveled there in search of whatever traces might still linger. That’s how I found myself standing on the spot where once was Muddy Waters’ front room.

Apart from the plaque, there isn’t much else today, just a vacant, grassy lawn, some shrubs, and one gnarled tree trunk that must have heard it all. But to know exactly what happened on that day in 1941, once the recording equipment was switched on, even now we can just listen. First, Waters runs through a song called “Country Blues,” and then, after its final words (“Yeah, I been mistreated, baby, now. Baby, and I don’t mind dying”), you can hear the sound of Lomax’s footsteps, walking across the porch toward where Waters sits inside. “I wondered if you’d tell me,” Lomax asks him, in a voice that manages to be both deferential and insistent, “if you can remember, when it was that you made that blues? ... Tell me a little of the story of it, if you don’t mind, if it’s not too personal. I want to know the facts, and how you felt and why you felt the way you did. It’s a very beautiful song.”

And you hear Waters explain how he had been fixing the puncture of a car tire and thinking about a girl who had treated him badly. “I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind...and I started to sing and went on with it.” Eventually, Waters readies to play a second song. “Just a minute,” Lomax tells him. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready.” Once Lomax has set a fresh side of an acetate disc recording, Waters begins: “Well, I feel tomorrow like I feel today, gonna pack my suitcase, make my getaway. Woman, I’m troubled ...”

It’s a blessing that we have both these recordings and some surviving field notes, because, somewhat perplexingly, later in life Lomax himself wasn’t always the most reliable witness to the events of his own and others’ past. In his 1993 memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began, for instance, Lomax wrote plenty about these Mississippi adventures, but a fair amount is verifiably askew. He conflated two Mississippi journeys in consecutive years (1941 and 1942) into a single 1942 visit, and he incorrectly stated not only that this second date is when he discovered Muddy Waters (in a location he misidentified), but that he did so while in search of the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson, though there is clear evidence that he must have known of Johnson’s death (Johnson died in 1938) some years before. And though he mentions that he was in Mississippi as part of a joint project with Fisk University in Nashville, the region’s preeminent Black university, more than 80 years later deep contention remains about the ways in which Lomax may have inappropriately taken sole credit for a shared endeavor. In his memoir, for example, he states that the project was his idea, even though good evidence seems to suggest that it had been proposed by the folklorist and composer John Wesley Work III, who was with him on that first day with Muddy Waters.

Muddy Waters was a sharecropper in Clarksdale, Mississippi, when in August 1941 Lomax recorded him singing inside his home. The story goes that hearing his own voice gave Waters, illustrated above, confidence to eventually quit farming and pursue music full time. Tim O'Brien

Fortunately, in the case of someone who became famous, like Waters, other material exists to help pin down exactly what happened, and when. We know Waters’ own perspective of that summer day when his music was first recorded from interviews he gave over the years that were collated in writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon’s 2002 biography, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. That, for instance, when Lomax and his companions turned up, Waters’ first thought, hearing that a white man was looking for him, was that the authorities had found out he was selling whiskey, and that Lomax had to gradually win Waters’ confidence before he could succeed in convincing the musician that he really did just want to hear him play his music.

As for the house that once stood where I found a vacant, grassy plot—well, that has its own remarkable story. For many years, it lay empty. In 1987, it was damaged in a tornado. That year, Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top’s lead guitarist and singer, visited and took away a cypress roof timber, which he dropped off with a guitar maker in Memphis who crafted two guitars from the wood. Subsequently, during a post-tornado cleanup, the three damaged outer rooms, the roof and the porch were removed and taken into storage by Stovall Farms, leaving only the original 19th-century central cabin.

In 1996, the cabin was leased for five years by the House of Blues, the restaurant and entertainment chain. It was taken apart and shipped off to be reassembled in different House of Blues venues and exhibitions, appearing that first summer in Chicago and Atlanta. The House of Blues apparently even sold “Muddy Waters Cabin World Tour” T-shirts. Eventually, in 2001, the central cabin structure returned closer to home, taking a permanent place in the middle of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. (Clarksdale’s centrality in the story of the blues was recently reinforced, and fancifully reimagined, in the movie Sinners.)

That is how, last fall, inside the museum, I was able to walk into the actual home where Lomax’s first recording session with Waters took place, light streaming through the gaps in the aged horizontal wood beams. Within and around the cabin were various objects from or relating to Waters’ life, including one of the guitars Gibbons had made from the cabin’s timber. Also parked right here, inside the exhibition hall, next to where Waters’ porch would once have been, is a 1939 Ford Deluxe, the model Lomax was driving when he pulled up to the cabin, its trunk propped open to show the kind of hefty recording equipment Lomax used to record and cut 16-inch acetate disks.

Two days earlier, in Memphis, I’d met with Gordon, Waters’ biographer. He had plenty of interesting and complex opinions to share about Lomax, including a description of an awkward scene in his recent documentary, Newport and the Great Folk Dream, where Lomax seems paternalistically controlling of a group of blues artists rehearsing for the 1964 festival. But Gordon nonetheless reaffirmed what he sees as Lomax’s central achievement: “I think Alan Lomax found great artists and he made great fieldwork recordings. Some of them, man, he is cutting into the red, and they are just all the more powerful for it. You know, he’s getting the grit of it. He understands it.”

Lomax returned to Mississippi several times. Far from all the recordings he made there involved blues artists—he also collected oral histories and children’s songs and extensively documented diverse forms of religious expression at church services, drawing on a wide range of musical idioms. Perhaps most notably, in 1942 Lomax met, near the small town of Senatobia, a blind multi-instrumentalist named Sid Hemphill, who, among his many skills, played the cane fife, a simple side-blown flute. Fife-and-drum bands were a Civil War-era military staple, but the version of fife-and-drum music that had developed in this pocket of the South was something distinct—“an outcropping of African music in North America,” Lomax would excitedly proclaim. Hemphill suggested that Lomax come the following day to one of the picnics where fife-and-drum bands played for hours. Lomax did so, recorder in hand, and toward the end of his life he would describe this as “the main find of my whole career—the African fife-and-drum dance bands of the Mississippi Hills.”

Lomax returned to Mississippi again during his 1959 Southern Journey, where he revisited and recorded Hemphill, then 83, for the final time. He also made one further discovery when, while recording some other musicians nearby, their neighbor, a farmer in his mid-50s who had been picking cotton all day, walked out of the surrounding trees carrying his guitar, and started playing for Lomax. This was the man who, following this serendipitous encounter, would go on to have a significant degree of late-life fame as Mississippi Fred McDowell.

But it was a recording made at another Mississippi stop during those 1959 travels that would, much later, have perhaps the most improbable afterlife of all.

6. Mississippi: Incarceration

The Mississippi State Penitentiary was colloquially known (as it still is to this day) as Parchman. It was a place Lomax visited several times, first with his father and later without him. What had initially drawn the elder Lomax was the notion that prisoners’ isolation might preserve a pure wellspring of song, particularly songs sung during forced labor, untainted by modernity. His son, who had recorded there twice in the late 1940s, had a more nuanced and complex read—he’d write of how the prisoners’ songs conveyed “verse after verse of sardonic irony and of veiled protest”—but he was clearly also drawn by what could be heard in this sequestered world. When he went back in September 1959, he was hoping to capture the kind of prisoners’ repertoire he’d heard before with the more modern equipment he now had—a suitcase-size Ampex stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The visit lasted three or four days. On the last, Lomax recorded a group of prisoners singing accompanied by the staggered syncopation of their axes hitting tree trunks: the rhythm of work, the rhythm of song, the rhythm of punishment. Among the many songs Lomax recorded were two versions of “Po’ Lazarus,” about a man named Lazarus being hunted down and shot. The second version was led by a prisoner named James Carter. The song went on for more than 11 minutes. At the beginning, Lomax encourages the prisoners to get their ax drops in time. Later on, he interjects again: “Go ahead a minute more.” After, Lomax discusses with them the song’s history, then concludes, “Well, I think we got something good.”

The final few minutes of this version would appear a couple of years later on an LP titled Bad Man Ballads, one of a series of Southern Journey compilations. Then it was largely forgotten. But nearly four decades after that, the music producer T Bone Burnett, putting together music for the Coen brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, set the film’s evocative plantation chain gang opening to this recording. The film met great success, and its soundtrack was a sensation: It won multiple Grammy Awards and sold more than eight million copies in the United States alone. Afterward, a search began for James Carter. Perhaps against the odds, he was found: a then-76-year-old man who had been living in Chicago since his release from prison in 1967. Carter, who subsequently gave a couple of interviews in which he seemed both gratified and bemused by the attention, recalled little of being recorded by Lomax, though he did remember learning the song itself from an older convict named Red Kid (“He was a knife man”) and he certainly remembered how they would sing as they labored: “See, back in them days, work was work. Swingin’ that ax....But you get that song goin’, you can get along pretty good.” Lomax’s daughter brought Carter a check for $20,000, just the first advance on more royalties to come, and a platinum disc.

Knowing that I was going to be in Mississippi, I imagined that I would drive down to the prison, stand outside, and take in whatever distant sense I could of where Lomax once was. I expected little more. Prisons are rarely much keener to let people in than they are to let people out. But when I wrote to the authorities anyway, they responded positively. And when I turned up at the appointed time, I was met by an inmate named Houston Jones, who was waiting inside the front gate. I soon came to realize why he may have been chosen to guide me. In the 1960s, an inmate band, known simply as the Parchman Band, garnered a degree of attention (they issued an album in 1969), and around three years ago some inmates restarted the band, with Jones at its center. More than that, he is clearly trusted within the prison system, and is a personable and persuasive advocate for how Parchman has been changing.

After meeting with Scott Middlebrooks, then the prison’s superintendent, Jones and I headed out to explore, just the two of us in an ATV. Parchman doesn’t fit conventional archetypes of what a prison is. Its boundaries extend over 18,000 acres, or about 28 square miles, and around much of its perimeter there is no solid barrier. Over the next couple of hours, we visited several now-vacant housing units, walking through deserted old cells and common areas. It appears that when buildings are abandoned here, they are just that: left as they had been on the last day they were used, then allowed to fall apart, roofs collapsing in, like an experiment in entropy. The most overgrown of all, what was once Camp 4, we reached by gunning the ATV off-track through the undergrowth. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride in there,” Jones predicted, “but I think it’s worth it.” The vegetation took over even inside the crumbling stone structures, creepers making their way across the ground rubble. Standing there, the past oozes all around you. Even so, what I’d really hoped to find was one of the places where Lomax actually recorded in 1959. I knew that the place where Carter sang “Po’ Lazarus” was at the former Camp B, on another site that was no longer part of the prison, but I’d hoped to find either Camp 7 or Camp 11, where Lomax spent whole days recording. But Jones, who knows this land fairly well, told me that they no longer exist, and that he had no idea where they had been.

Instead, I did what I told myself Lomax would have done—just listened, to understand what I could of what is here now. We toured an active area, Unit 28, the housing unit for the prison's “garment factory,” where, among other things, prisoners make the striped clothing they all wear (Jones is in green-and-white, the most permissive of four categories), and we passed field after field where inmates farm soy beans, watermelon and turnip greens; we visited the horse barn, swept past a lake where Jones said he’s seen bald eagles, coyotes, bobcats, otters, beavers and muskrats, and we went to the inmates’ church, where I met an affable man named Henry who has been at Parchman for more than 30 years. I could but imagine what he had seen: Even if the kind of slave labor institution Lomax visited is long in the past, some horrific accounts of events and practices here are far more recent. But Jones argued that this prison has been making great changes. “Parchman now, if you have to be an inmate, this is a great place to do it,” he attested. “There are so many things to be involved in.” Another place we stopped was a metal shed where the new Parchman band rehearses and where later that afternoon I sat and watched a long, rousing rehearsal—they’re good—and talked a little with the band members. (Naturally, they have a variety of stories, but many of them, like Jones, have murder convictions.) Before that, though, at lunchtime—supposedly at the end of our explorations—Jones took me to the rudimentary museum in a building near the prison entrance, a precursor to something more substantial the prison is planning. One large room displayed a few historical documents, and looking at the exhibits—there’s a copy of the 1969 Parchman Band album, for instance—I came across a hand-drawn map, clearly old but undated, of the prison site, apparently drawn by a prisoner. And it indicated many old camps, including Camp 7.

I took a photograph for reference and asked Jones whether we could try to find it. He was willing. “Today is an adventure, that is for sure,” he said. So after lunch we headed back out several miles toward the prison’s western perimeter. Eventually, we came to an open area used for burning trash, but there was no sign at all of any buildings, past or present. Looking at the map, Camp 7 should have been a little north of here. It was not easy going. The vegetation was often above head height, much of it brambles, and the ground underfoot was chaotically uneven. But, feeling stubborn about it, I pushed on, Jones gamely following. Just when it seemed like nothing but folly, I came across a few broken bricks. Soon we were clambering over a huge, ramshackle brick pile, until suddenly the vegetation fell away and we were on the flat stone floor of a long-gone building. I stopped.

Alan Lomax’s day here, at Parchman’s Camp 7, came right toward the end of his prime recording years. He filled two reels of tape with 16 songs, scribbling on the front of the tape box the names of the prisoners he was recording, the titles of the songs, and in the margins occasional notes and observations: “large group hoeing” and “lovely singing and recording” and “tender, sweet.”

In truth, beyond the former camp’s crumbling floor, there was not much to see, just a few twisted bits of metal and an old broken payphone—relics that looked a little too modern to have been there in 1959. And in fact, later, studying old satellite photos, I saw that there was a structure here as recently as 2010; evidently, in this part of Mississippi, it doesn’t take long for the wild to reclaim its own. Even so, just finding this place felt like a small triumph.

Maybe the most obvious lesson of this search for Alan Lomax’s elusive imprint across Mississippi was that very elusiveness. He didn’t document and record what would always be here; he documented and recorded what would soon be gone. He’s not here, and the men he was with are not here, but what he recorded remains. Maybe his true achievement is measured less by what he helped popularize in his day and more by the huge well of music—along with the cultures, ways of life and forms of expression it revealed and safeguards—that he alone rescued from fading away into silence.

“Quiet, now, everybody,” Lomax instructed at one point, on that September day in 1959 here at Camp 7, before preserving for all to hear the yearning, beautiful, unaccompanied voice of a man named Leroy Jackson, which rang out in the air somewhere close to where I stood. “Really quiet. OK now, go ahead.”

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine Summer 2026 issue

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This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine