Anti-Gravity Bunny

 
Download Southern Journey 1: Georgia Sea Islands, Volume 1

UPDATE: A lot of the songs from this record are available elsewhere either digitally or on vinyl. I would highly recommend checking out Georgia Sea Island Singers’ Join The Band on Mississippi Records (MRP-003) for a new pressing with some of these songs. This Southern Journey record is still unavailable as is, so I’ll leave it here for now. See Nathan’s (from Cultural Equality) comment for more details.

This is one of my favorite Lomax collections. Stripped down blues, only two tracks that have any instruments (Hobart Smith on banjo, and a couple dudes playing drums & fife), the rest are pure vocals, hand clapping, and foot stomping. It’s raw and powerful, especially Bessie Jones’ take on “O Death.” There’s some wonderful chatter in between a couple of the songs, like when Peter Davis talks about how he learned “Row The Boat, Child” from his old blind grandfather who would sing it while making rowing motions in his armchair.

One of the really interesting things, and maybe if there’s a Moby expert out there you can help me out on this, is a lot of the songs on this record sound like the vocals used in Moby’s Play. I don’t think he actually sampled from this but it sounds like he heard this record and was like, “I need to recreate this.” Granted, I haven’t listened to Play in 5 or 10 years, but I have some of those tracks ingrained in my memory, and Georgia Sea Islands lines up almost perfectly. Weird.

Either way, this album is incredible, and isn’t already up in the Lomax Archive, so have at it. And be on the lookout for more Lomax collections here in the future, I got about 6 or 7 more that are from other countries and also aren’t in the Archive, so get excited.

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I love this record. Although I don’t know much about it. Apparently both Charlotte Daniels & Pat Webb were married and kinda big in the early ’60s urban folk music scene but I can’t find too much info about this particular album. I think this is the only collaboration they did and it was a one-off afternoon recording type thing, just picking songs off the top of their head to play together, which is what makes this so awesome.

It’s not especially folky. They play a mix of stuff, a lot of old blues, traditional ballads, and upbeat almost rockabilly tunes. Daniels has a fantastically rich voice and Webb’s guitar picking is spot on. I can’t quite explain why this record does it for me, though. I’m pretty sure it has to do with the selection of songs and Daniels’ voice, but there’s something mysterious about it that makes it endlessly enjoyable.

This record, and dozens more, belonged to a family member who recently died. They were given to me to digitize so the rest of the family could listen to them. I plan on sharing some of the most interesting ones on AGB as well, so keep an eye out for old folk records popping up under the OOPs category.

Download Charlotte Daniels & Pat Webb