Traditional Music of Coastal Louisiana: 1934 Lomax Recordings

This talk examines the songs recorded in the summer of 1934 by folklorist John Lomax, with assistance from his son Alan, who was then a teenager. While the music they recorded there has often been described as Cajun or Creole music, what they actually found was much more complex: a diverse admixture of old medieval lays, Continental pop songs, blues ballads, round dance songs, traditional ballads in French, a Scottish jig, and much more. This talk coincides with the release of the book Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana, a study of the 1934 trip.

Speaker Biography: Joshua Clegg Caffery is a writer and musician. He is a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers and a longtime member of the Louisiana French band Feufollet. Caffery was nominated for a Grammy in 2010 for his work on the Feufollet album “En Couleurs.” He is currently the Alan Lomax Fellow in Folklife Studies at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress.

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