Folk Songs N Amer Pa

A great piece of work from Lomax, the Lomax collaborators, and publisher Doubleday. Large format, decorative cloth over hardback boards, with a heavy-duty binding. Many illustrations. 317 songs. 623 pages. 16 page introduction by Lomax. Chapter introductions by Lomax or his team. Multiverse lyrics and alternate lyrics. Color front pastedown map showing the locations of different Song Style Families. Color back pastedown map of the Names and Places of the Songs. Every song appears to be annotated by Lomax, or by his team, with an introduction explaining the background of the song and quotes from Americans such as Faulkner, Woody Guthrie, or Reuben Delano. The simpler songs are notated with melody and guitar chords. The more complex ones have a piano accompaniment. There are over 25 pp of Appendices: Book List, Guitar and Banjo Guide, Discography, Index of Song Titles, Index of First Lines.

I became really interested in a written compilation of folk music after having bought an excellent folk collection released by folkways. I picked this book out of only a few that looked decent and my guess is it may be the best single volume for the layman. I'm very pleased with the range of folk music and short histories.

I bought this book when it was new 45 years ago. I learned to play the guitar and sing folk songs by going through the pages of this book and trying to do as many as I can. Some caught on, some didn't. Decades later I started to seriously listen to blues and banjo music, fiddling, and old time ballads. I started study old time music seriously. I bought this book again and went through it. So many songs well known by lovers and students of the blues and old time music of banjo playing and fiddling of Black and Canadian Maritime folk music that I had not remembered or had not known were there as well as the obvious songs. Having said that, this book reflects the particular weaknesses of Alan Lomax and his work. This is a book of public domain traditional music collected by Lomax and his father and others, but copyrighted in the name of Alan Lomax. The book hues pretty close to Lomax's general romantic "Americanism" and belief in some inherent superiority of "folk" music over "commercial music" whereas recent scholarship suggests the interaction between the two is more important than the difference. However, this is the basic collection of American folk songs. The advances we have made in the availability of recordings of all kinds of traditional music, in the specialization and extension of scholarship of specific genre, specific cultures and sub cultures, and other aspects of the music mean probably no one today would attempt to publish one big book of general traditional folk songs. However, that has come in large part by musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts who came out of the generation who learned their folk songs through this book and other work Lomax and his colleagues did. If you love real folk music, this is a good book to have.

This is the folk singer's Bible. There is a short synopsis of each song and the song listing includes the lyrics and a melody line as well as chords. There is an appendix written by Peggy Seeger that describes basic picking techniques for guitar and banjo. Each song is labelled with suggested techniques from that appendix. Finally there is a chord transposition chart included.A wonderful resource for the beginning singer of traditional songs.

This is a book that is the symbol of the work that Alan Lomax has put into collecting folksongs. The book is one of the greatest, and what some folksingers read and memorize. It is well worth whatever anyone would sell it for, and probably more than that. It also has a discography of some of Lomax's favourite folk albums up to 1960. A good investment.