A Field Guide to... Alabama
28 videos • 605 views • by Smithsonian Folkways Travel through Alabama with Smithsonian Folkways! This field guide is curated by author, radio host, and founding director of the Southern Music Research Center Burgin Mathews. About the playlist, Mathews writes: "This “field guide” offers an intro to the historic sounds of Alabama, as reflected in the catalog of Smithsonian Folkways. The original Folkways mission—to uplift what label founder Moses Asch called “people’s music” and to document, indeed, the entire “world of sound”—is evident throughout these Alabama recordings. Here, ordinary people sing field hollers, spirituals, and protest songs; children play games; elders worship; a country brass band makes a joyful noise; and civil rights foot soldiers use their voices to enact social change. Certainly this playlist is not a comprehensive survey of Alabama music. The state’s rich legacies in both Sacred Harp singing and country music barely appear in the Smithsonian Folkways catalog, and other essential traditions are not represented at all. Alabama can boast long and influential histories in gospel quartet singing, old-time fiddling, blues and boogie-woogie piano, big band swing, free improv and the avant-garde, collegiate marching bands, and more. The state is the home of Muscle Shoals soul, the birthplace of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips and gospel music’s Dorothy Love Coates, the launching pad of intergalactic bandleader Sun Ra. More recently, Alabama has witnessed an explosion of celebrated songwriters and performers: Drive-By Truckers, Brittany Howard, Jason Isbell, Waxahatchee, Lee Bains, and others have all developed their unique voices and visions from their Alabama roots. If this playlist doesn’t map the full diversity of Alabama’s musical styles, what it offers instead is a deep and glorious dive into a few distinctive and inspiring wells of tradition. In the early 1950s, researchers Harold Courlander and Frederic Ramsey, Jr. documented the state’s rural Black music traditions in two extensive series of Folkways albums. In the 1960s, the Folkways label chronicled the unfolding civil rights movement in real time, releasing audio reports from the movement’s central Southern battlegrounds; in the years since, Smithsonian Folkways has remained an essential resource for the music of the Black freedom struggle in America. This playlist leans hard into these themes, with briefer excursions into the origins of jazz, Alabama poetry, and other homegrown sounds." Read more at https://folkways.si.edu/playlist/a-fi...