It's difficult to imagine a world without Alan Lomax. I'm not sure I'd want to try. Our friends at Rounder Records (whom some will doubtless think by now are my closet employers) have gifted us yet again with an indispensable piece of popular culture. Framed in the larger context of Rounder's extensive Lomax catalogue, this sampler is essential for anybody who would seek to understand the evolution of popular music, both in the United States and in the wider world.

Popular Songbook has/will have Rounder counterparts dealing specifically with blues, gospel and bluegrass, but this disc stands alone in its attempt to embrace, in only 22 cuts, the scope and range of modern popular songs.

Before mentioning a few highlights and favorites, a word about the exceptional liner notes: masterful. Jeffrey Greenberg's song notes are rich in detail and annotation, and the essay on Lomax's role as the chronicler of modern popular music (by Gideon D'Archangelo, Anna Lomax Chairetakis and Ellen Harold) gives the listener the full context of what Lomax means to those of us who would understand how the music of yesterday has led to the music of today. Greenberg in particular will take exceptional delight in linking old prison-recorded tunes to the likes of such '70s wunderkinder as Ram Jam. Even without the music, the notes provide an instant primer on the connectedness of the musical past to the musical present and the musical future.

The challenge in programming collections such as this is what to include and what to leave out. The smart producer recognizes that "getting it all" simply isn't possible in the format of a single CD, and so it is with this disc. Instead, listeners are given a taste, a suggestion of possible avenues for further investigation. While any of us could have populated a disc with equally worthy cuts, this selection need apologize to no one.

The disc opens with "Joe Lee's Rock," a gutbucket blues piece recorded in 1959, and moves to a 1940 recording of "Do-Re-Mi" with a running commentary by Woody Guthrie. The congregation of the Independence Church in Tyro, Mississippi, next delivers solidly with the call-and-response "Jesus on the Mainline" (covered later by Ralph Stanley, Ry Cooder and others). The work of Leadbelly is introduced with a 1934 Angola Prison recording of "Midnight Special," and Vera Ward Hall's "Trouble So Hard" is heard in another powerful recording from 1959.

Further on down the line, we get the original recording of "Black Betty" here by James "Iron Head" Baker and other prisoners in Mississippi in 1933, later to be immortalized by the aforementioned Ram Jam. Again from 1959, Sidney Lee Carter offers "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby," a tune that would be expanded to great effect in the recent film O Brother Where Art Thou. That same year of 1959 would also yield the whimsical "Join the Band," rendered with exceptional gusto by the Georgia Sea Island Singers. The surprises continue, with an early working of "Sloop John B," recorded by Clayton Simmons and friends in the Bahamas in 1935. As is the case for all of these tunes, Greenberg notes that later popular artists brought the work into the mainstream (in this case, by the Beach Boys, in 1966).

The wonders continue. A very rudimentary form of "If You Wanna Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life" appeared first as "Ugly Woman," presented here in a 1946 recording by the Duke of Iron. It is noted that Leadbelly's "Gallows Pole" (1938) would ultimately find a wholly different audience in the 1970s when it was covered by Led Zeppelin. The work song "Rosie," from a Mississippi Farm Penitentiary recording in 1947, documents a prime preoccupation of men behind bars, and is counterpointed strikingly with the haunting instrumental "Alborada de Vigo" (1942). The disc closes with Georgia Turner's hard-edged 1937 version of "House of the Rising Sun" and Leadbelly's "Irene Goodnight," also from 1937 (later recorded as "Goodnight Irene" by damned near everybody).

All in all, this is a wonderful collection. It will lead you to music you never thought of exploring, and you may never listen to your Animals or Hendrix or Zeppelin records in precisely the same way again.

- Rambles
written by Gilbert Head
published 27 March 2004