“…the recording machine can be a voice for the voiceless, for the millions in the world who have no access to the main channels of communication, and whose cultures are being talked to death by all sorts of well-intentioned people – teachers, missionaries, etc – and who are being shouted into silence by our commercially bought and paid for loudspeakers. It took me a long time to realize that the main point of my activity was to redress the balance a bit, to put sound technology at the disposal of the folk, to bring channels of communication to all sorts of artists and areas.” –Alan Lomax, Hi-Fi Stereo Review, 1960

Jayme Stone’s publicity sheet lists him as a banjoist and instigator. This may be why he thought it wise to start the Alan Lomax project, an educational, collaborative effort that brings renowned folk musicians together to perform a musical cross section of the great folklorist’s field recordings. The project began in Canada, gained enough steam to cross the Atlantic, and will be seen at several schools, and workshops this year, and in concert form here in Seattle Thursday night.

Stone himself has become renowned for his askance look at modern banjo music, and what constitutes folk. His music is motivated by tunes he collected in West Africa, and along the spice routes of the Indian Ocean, the particularly booty shaking beats of baroque by Bach, Moorish sword fighting, and Appalachia’s connection to Africa through the banjo.

It’s fitting then, that he be so closely involved with the Lomax recordings. The Lomaxes were a family of folklorists and musicologists responsible for recording the tunes and tales of an American people who had no agency at that time to record their own oral histories. Alan Lomax’s father John Lomax was gifted his wax recorder from Thomas Edison’s widow, and—at a time when big band jazz, vaudeville, and minstrelsy were the accepted forms of popular music—took to places like penitentiaries and plantations down south to record what he thought was the actual voice of the people. This was fairly revolutionary, since at the time the best-selling music was sheet music.

By the time John met his second wife, Ruby Lomax, his son Alan was already old enough to travel along. The three worked as a team, John and Alan recording sound, and Ruby doing the vital job of recording artist information right down to cultural colloquialisms they liked to use in song. For a time they recorded on a portable “Presto,” a machine that etched sounds onto aluminum acetate discs, but those recordings were for the Library of Congress, and the congress of the time couldn’t understand why money was being funneled to intellectuals who made it their business to record people of color in the south, and that ceased. In a way this got Alan Lomax out on his own, and by the time Alan began his own projects the technologically marvelous Magnecord tape recorder had made it possible for him to travel the world recording folk music with ease and at length on reel-to-reel.

It’s not just that they recorded, either, Alan and John were the first people to recognize the greatness of, and record on Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter at Angola Prison. As folklore tells it, the same recordings were taken to the governor and aided in the pardoning of Leadbelly, who was serving a life sentence. Artists you may have heard of like Woody Guthrie and Son House were ushered into historical permanence by Lomax’s efforts, and despite his reluctance to give up his royalties at times (cultural appropriation starts when you believe you know what’s best for a culture that ain’t even yours), the music Alan Lomax and his parents recorded with such a singularity of purpose is valuable enough that it should be celebrated.

Jayme Stone will be collaborating with Eli West (of popular Seattle duo Cahalen Morrison & Eli West), fiddler Brittany Haas, vocalist Moira Smiley of VOCO, and bassist Joe Phillips at Columbia City Theater Thursday night. They promise Bahamian sea chanties (my personal favorites, since The River Of Song Collection was my intro to Lomax field recordings), African-American a cappella singing from the Georgia Sea Islands, Old World weavers’ work songs, ancient Appalachian ballads, fiddle tunes, game songs, and ring shouts. Tickets here.