This is a straight reprint of the original...they actually photographed the pages instead of having it re-typeset, thank god...and all the David Stone Martin illustrations are intact.

This is THE classic on jazz music and writing. Crazy stories, crazy times, with the unbelievable spinner of tales Jelly Roll holding the floor. Lomax could have just printed Jelly's comments verbatim and this would've been great, but he went to the trouble of tracking down a bunch of people who knew Jelly or were otherwise around New Orleans in the early daze, and this added detail spices the pot considerably. Alan Lomax's own commentary and observations are witty, charming, and spot on.

This edition is made definitive by a scholarly afterword bringing the reader fully up-to-date on modern Jelly Roll research. Quite a few pertinent details are now known that weren't when Lomax was writing this.

Up there with Mezz Mezzrow's "Really the Blues" as essential an text in the American music pantheon.

This is one of the rare books for it can be enjoyed by just about anyone who picks it up. Its the amazing account of the life of Jelly Roll Morton, one of the best jazz pianists of all time. Though a braggart and troubled man, he created some of the very best pieces of jazz. The book goes into his life from his childhood and his time working at Storyville to the very troubled end in the early forties. You learn about his family, his troubled relationships with Anita and Mabel and how he went from being wildly successful to dying virtually forgotten. Voodoo, New Orleans, jazz and Creole culture, its all here.

Written with flair and never boring, Mr. Jelly Roll is a book that you will read more than once. Its a look at a legend and a glimpse into a world we can only know of through books and music. Get this if you want a good read and a look at Mr. Morton's life. A true classic.

Alan Lomax interviewed Jelly Roll while doing an extensive set of recordings shortly before Morton's death. He followed up with a number of interviews with people who knew Jelly Roll. Lomax did a fabulous job of keeping himself out of the way while letting the often colorful information from the interviews tell the story of Jelly's part in the birth of jazz, a story with triumphs, massive ego and ultimate decline. I read a library copy and am buying a copy for a present.

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.

This book is a must for anyone interested in American folksongs. It ranks right up there with the Lomax, Beldon, Hunter, and Randolph collections. It may be hard to find, and a bit pricey, but well worth the effort. I'd give it ten stars if the rating would go that high. You will enjoy this collection.
Michael Breid, a.k.a.Arkansas Red-Ozark Troubadour
Ozark Mountains, Arkansas

You may go to this book to find out about the Warner's fascinating song-collecting trips begun in western North Carolina in 1938 and lasting into the 1960s, but you'll find an amazing repertoire of songs waiting to be sung.

Tom Dooley is the song Frank Proffitt sang to the Warners long ago. The Kingston Trio heard Frank Warner sing it in the 1950s and made it their signature song. But it is only one of hundreds of songs that the world is waiting to hear.

Read the words of rural America in the voice of Lee Monroe Presnell, Yankee John Galusha or Grammy Fish. These are singers the Lomaxes would have spent a lot of tape on.

The songs themselves would be enough, but this is a book full of Anne Warner's scholarship and thoughtful treatment of her subject. Frank Warner's photographs will take you to a far off place.

This book is an invaluable collection of Caribbean rings games, documenting traditions that are slowing fading away under the crush of North American pop culture. It is a cherished resource for my wife, who grew up in Dominica playing many of these games and now teaches them as part of her dance classes in Ohio. Anyone who buys this book must also get the companion CD from Rounder Records.

If you can hum "Home On the Range", you have been influenced by this book. Without it, folk music as you know it would be different. Seeing in 1908 that the cowboy's way of life was dying, John Lomax went out into the field and onto the range recording and transcribing This collection became the backbone of American folk music and its traditions. Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote the preface, was so impressed with the result that he created the Folk Song Dept. of the Library of Congress and made John Lomax its first curator. Many songs first saw print here including "The Chisolm Trail" and "The Zebra Dun". Were it not for this book, "Home On the Range" and "Down In the Valley" would have passed into the ether and out of the collective conciousness. The only flaw is that of the 200+ ballads collected here, there are tunes provided for only 50. This was somewhat remedied by the second edition, same title, by John and Alan Lomax (his son, who succeded his father at the Library) published in 1938. And while many of the ballads are now familiar, many are not. Add the fact that each song is likely to have many more verses than are found in modern songbooks and you have a valuable reference work as well. Balladiers are still mining the treasures. The knowlege that these verses were published in the waning days of the Wild West,before the first cameras rolled in Hollywood, makes for insightful reading about a life which is no more. Collectors and folk enthusiasts no longer have to pay exorbitant prices to obtain a copy of this important volume. I won't say what my copy of the 1910 printing (the only other available!) cost me, but I can assure you that $75 is a bargain by comparison.

"Folk Song USA" (also published under the title "Best Loved American Folk Songs")contains 111 American ballads as collected by John A and Allan Lomax. Many of these songs were first printed in other John Lomax books including "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" as words only or words with melody only. Unlike previous books from the Lomaxes that presented these ballads as poetry (how can one have a song without the melody?), this book was meant to be sung! Each song has simple piano arrangements by Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger with guitar chords supplied by Pete Seeger. The short description, giving its known history and how John Lomax first encountered it, often offers valuable insights on rural American life before WWII. Like most Lomax books, these ballads have more verses than are typically found in other collections. This book is found in both hard cover (under both titles)and paperback as "Folk Song USA". If I was to recommend one folk song book only for the average library, this would be it. Highly recommended!

This book is important, and maybe even vital, in spite of itself. Lomax is the real thing: He knows his material incredibly well, and even his most offhand paragraphs on anything at all related to African influences on American/southern culture are right on the mark. His field recordings were/are an incalculable contribution to American music. Some of them brought major artists -- Muddy Waters being the most obvious example -- from total obscurity squarely into the mainstream. He was a true scholar, and a kind of cultural hero. That said, this memoir/history was not exactly a joy to read. Lomax has a terrible weakness for lyrical language, but he just doesn't have the chops as a writer; his story is so good he should have been as plain in the telling as possible. His overheated romance with the black American male is often embarrassing. Maybe the best part of the book is a long passage when he simply gets out of the way and we hear directly from one of his subjects for many pages. It's not that Lomax had no right to do a book like this -- he had every right to. And even at its most purple, what he has to say is crucial if you want to understand American music. I just wish he could have spared us some of his attempts at heightened language and overwrought description. Complaining about white rock musicians, he writes, "To my jaundiced Southern ears .. many rock guitarists are more concerned with showing how many notes they can get off and how many chords they know tan what the song has to say or how the guitar can speak for them." I would say something very similar about the way Lomax wrote this book -- he should have been less concerned about how many phrases he could get off and how many words he knew, and just let his wonderful story tell itself plainly.

As a native, white expatriot Mississippian, I read with great interest Alan Lomax's account of the genesis of the Blues--which he considers the most important indigenous musical form of the 20th century globally. As grand a claim as this is, Lomax carries the credentials and the experience to back it up. Aside from the music, what he reveals is bitter suffering and unconscionable cruelty against African-Americans, the quality of whose lives was scarcely better than those of their slave grandparents. Out of this tragedy grew an art and a culture than far surpassed that of the oppressors. The poignant majesty of these folk poets is engaging and arresting. Their ability to find beauty, humor, passion, and dignity in lives that were riven with strife speaks of the indomitable spirits of these people. Lomax's research was timely, because much of the music and poetry he heard in the 40's no longer exists, and he chronicles an invaluable chapter in the history of American art and culture. Dr. William Bradley Roberts

Alan Lomax has done more than any living man to unearth the powerful African music heritage that lives in many different genres of American music. This book is only part of the wealth that he has dug up and offered to us, so that we may better know ourselves. Check out the 4CD set of his recordings "Sounds of the South" for a soundtrack to this book. But no book, no acetate, no film, can adequately depict the pain and suffering that Africans were subjected to in the US. Lomax's work, though, brings us closer, by bringing us the voices of the prisoners, the fieldworkers, the muleskinners, and the roustabouts who lived in a world we can scarce imagine today. Life was cheap then. People were brutal to one another. By Lomax's account, sex and violence seem to be more unrestrained in the first half of the 19th century than in the second. Today, Arnold kills people with laser guns to make a couple bucks for Hollywood. Then, Boss White would kill a man with a shotgun to the skull, just for complaining. After having read the book, I caught myself being hopeful for humanity. Maybe we are getting better

My father has an original copy of this book that I grew up reading. I was so very glad to see it back in print. The way that the book is arranged (railroad songs, chain gangs, blues, reels, cowboy songs, etc.) makes it easy to navigate. The bulk of the songs cataloged are not the familiar ones that one is used to seeing in other collections.

Not a bad book... Not the best, though. The Lomaxes put together a very complete and exhaustive volume of folk music, that's for sure. However, some of it manages to contradict their other books, or has some songs more or less complete than they are in those works. Some of their choices of songs as "folk music" are a little odd, too; "Beautiful" would be a good example of this. I would suggest Folk Song USA as a better reference, if you can find it.

This is not an exhaustive catalogue of ballads nor does it always contain the same version of a ballad that are published elsewhere under the Lomax name. The ballads are arranged by subject matter: Working on the Railroad; The Levee Camp; Southerrn Chain Gangs; Negro Bad Men; White Desperadoes; Mountain Songs; Cocaine and Whiskey; Blues; Creole Negroes; Reels; Minstrel Types; Breakdowns and Play Parties; Songs of Childhood; Vaqueros of the Southwest; Cowboy Songs; Songs of the Overlanders; Miner; Shanty-Boy; Erie Canal; Great Lake; Sailors and Sea Fights; Wars and Soldiers; White Spirituals and Negro Spirituals. Often there is a short story of the song in addition to the collection notes.

A decent introduction to the ballad form and its music precedes the collection. This is an essential reference to anyone interested in ballads in America.

As an amateur singer of folksongs, country, and "oldies", I was looking for a book with familiar tunes and lyrics. Although I only recognized a few of Ms. Ritchie's songs, I found the histories of each song very interesting. I took a chance and purchased the book, not sure of what I was getting. What I got was a nice read about the history of song, and a new interest in a person who obviously has a passion!

I love this book because it preserves the rough edges that the music of everday people has. If JR learned the verse to a song that didn't rhyme, she didn't "fix" it. The melodies are often asymmetrical, the ballads often have odd twists to their stories, and the emotion is just pure.

If you're looking for a book of songs for the camp-fire, this may not be it. If you're looking for the real songs of Appalachia, look no further.

This book is, among other things, a "lost writing" of Woody Guthrie's. Woody wrote not one but two "Forewords" and multi-paragraph introductions for nearly all the songs included, and for each of the several subject headings. Alan Lomax gathered together the songs, with help and guidance from his collaborators; Pete Seeger transcribed their melodies & simple guitar tablature ("G," "C7," etc.), and anyone with an elementary musical education can learn to sing and strum these songs from the text. Oh, and Woody wrote a lot of the songs, too - "Union Maid," "66 Highway Blues," and many others.

These are all topical songs - "protest" songs, labor-organizing songs, contemporary ballads - and many are guaranteed to rile Establishment partisans even today - for instance, "I Hate The Capitalist System" by Sara Ogan Gunning. There are songs by Kokomo Arnold, Big Bill Broonzy, Joe Hill, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Washboard Sam, Sonny Boy Williamson the First... and there are new Afterwords by Lomax and Seeger, plus great Depression-era photographs on every other page. This is an entertaining and valuable text, whether you plan to sing out or just read it in solitude.

I first starting using this book when I thought I was going to be a folklorist, about 30 years ago. I've been through 2 hardback copies and will probably have to buy the new paperback version. The most striking thing about Hard Hitting Songs..., is that it strips away all the glamor of the Folk Scare days to reveal the essence of these songs and the people who wrote and sang them. The stark black and white photography accompanying the songs is as evocative as the music. The simple presentation of the melody lines with chord symbols boils each song down to its essentials. A few lines of background on each song place it in historical, political and cultural context. And, many of them are pure politics.

These are the real songs of the people. True, some of them were written by professionals. Some are mere parodies of popular songs of the day. But all of them rise out of the lives of those who often had to make their own music if they were to have any at all.

The only dispiriting thing about this collection is that too many of the songs remain meaningful to too many modern Americans. On the other hand, it reminds us that even in this New Guilded Age, we have an economic history of which we should be mindful.

Pete Seeger used this book as his lecture notes when he appeared in 1971 at Cornell University's Willard Straight Hall for a lecture on "The Role of Music in the Labor Movement." It was more of a concert, really, but as always, he delivered the goods by bringing the text and music of the book to life.

Buy the book