Album Notes

Southern Journey: Tribute to Alan Lomax is inspired by musicologist Alan Lomax's Southern Journey, a 13-volume series of original field and studio recordings capturing the musical world of the rural South. Lomax is one of the great figures in American music, indelibly linked to the folk music he worked tirelessly to preserve. His career stretched over six decades and his recordings of folk music fill the vaults at the Library of Congress.

Lomax drove thousands of miles down nameless roads seeking out the jewels of the human spirit and is most famous for his work in the penitentiaries, plantations and lonely farms of the Mississippi Delta, collecting songs and stories of the folk who lived there. These recordings would eventually be published as Southern Journey.

Southern Journey is a two-hour staged performance that brings the Lomax archives to life through story and song. Audiences experience what he described as the "deep river of song that runs through the lives of all Americans" as Burton’s cast of diverse musicians and singers revive the spirit of the original collection with compelling authenticity. The performance captures a uniquely American experience as the musicians and singers gather together on the porch: work-calloused hands take up guitar and bass, banjo and fiddle, shaking off the dust of the day’s labor and fill the night air with song.

Marta Burton, who has performed as a soloist with orchestras and in concert halls throughout the U.S. and abroad including critically acclaimed concerts at the Kennedy Center, is both the creator of the concert and the evening’s host. She has received the blessings of the Lomax estate in the development and presentation of both the concert and the CD. Don Fleming, Executive Director of The Alan Lomax Archive, calls the project "a heartfelt program" honoring Alan Lomax.