SOUTHERN JOURNEY (REVISITED)
DVD LABEL
7/10 Back to Alan Lomax’s Dixie – with a subtly understated agenda. THE original Southern Journey was a schlep undertaken by the American musicologist Alan Lomax in 1959. He and his then partner, English folksinger Shirley Collins, lugged an Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorder though Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina, collecting performances by church choirs, jug bands, chain gangs, barroom warblers, front-porch crooners and assorted other guitar-pluckers, harp-blowers and banjo-botherers. Lomax and Collins’ recordings were – and are – astonishing, a glorious trove of treasures hauled from the deepest recesses of the collective national memory. There was gold indeed in them thar hills.
Southern Journey (Revisited), a film by Rob Curry and Tim Plester, is first and foremost a retracing of…
