Field Recorders Collective

A note on each of these Field Recorders Collective (FRC) releases explains the nonprofit's mission: "Your purchase of these recordings will give financial support to a continuation of this series and provide funds to the immediate families of the musician. . . . These recordings aim to honor the wishes of older musicians to share their tunes and styles with younger musicians, and keep traditional music alive and flourishing." Growing out of old-time banjo player and avid field recorder Ray Alden's relationships with an older generation of musicians, the FRC attempts to honor those relationships. Although Alden died in 2009, the organization continues to bring rare music into circulation in responsible ways that benefit the artists and shape contemporary performance practices through deepening understandings of this music.

In these seven releases from 2015, the FRC delivers field recordings and home recordings from relatively obscure fiddlers, intended primarily to satiate the hunger for new old tunes among contemporary old-time musicians and enthusiasts. For this audience, these recordings transform into source material for learning and listening. They become vital links to emplaced traditions. Taken as a whole, these releases complicate earlier quests to define regional styles, instead highlighting the creativity of individual players and the leaky boundaries of the genre.

Beyond this primary audience, these releases (and the broader FRC catalog) should be of interest to folklorists engaged with vernacular music traditions of Kentucky, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri. Likewise, folklorists and archivists with limited resources will find the FRC's production model worthy of attention. Recognizing that they deal in recordings with limited listenership, the FRC minimizes production costs to maximize artists' compensation and their own sustainability. Audio production—editing, equalizing, mastering—is done mostly by members of the organization. The project operates under a minimalist aesthetic, touching up the raw field recordings only enough to make them listenable and ready for broadcast. The same aesthetic shapes the physical CD packaging and graphics: FRC releases come in frugal cardboard sleeves, often with an image of the musician, brief biographical and contextual notes, and track listings. A note on the back directs listeners to a website with more interpretive material, liner notes, articles, and photographs (www.fieldrecorder.org). A kind of collaborative memory project, the website presents diverse materials, sourced from musicians, their families, field recorders, and other members of the old-time music world. These accessible online resources provide visitors with a sense of the artists who made the music and the context in which they made it. The FRC's online Bandcamp storefront—a digital download platform—rounds out their Web presence and further increases accessibility while minimizing production costs. My conversations with board members suggest that the FRC is open to partnerships with folklorists and archivists who have an interest in producing small releases of field recordings.

With the FRC mission and process laid out, I turn my attention to the recordings. Vesta Johnson with Steve Hall: North Missouri Dance Fiddling provides listeners with 40 well-recorded pieces that include expected Missouri tunes like "Dubuque," "Marmaduke's Hornpipe," "Walk Along John," and "Spotted Pony," while also presenting less common tunes like "Fat...