Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings by Joshua Clegg Caffery (review)

In 1934 song hunters John and Alan Lomax traveled to Louisiana to document folksongs for the Library of Congress (LC). By the end of the mission, the Lomax expedition had yielded a remarkable treasure trove of “multifarious and cosmopolitan” field recordings: drinking and sacred songs, ring shouts and jurés, logging hollers and blues, fiddle tunes, ballads, charivari compositions, and numerous points in between (4). These recordings formed the foundation of the LC’s Lomax collection while shaping the discourses surrounding the history of vernacular music in southwestern Louisiana.¹

Joshua Clegg Caffery’s Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana stands as the first systematic examination of the southern Louisiana materials John and Alan Lomax collected during the Great Depression.² Caffery makes clear that his book is not about Cajun music or zydeco. Rather, he considers the Lomax material as constituting the “substructure underpinning these genres” (2). Moreover, the book is not a monograph but rather an annotated compendium of transcribed and translated song texts derived from the Lomax recordings. “The central aim of this study,” the author explains, “is to examine and identify the materials in the 1934 Lomax foray into coastal Louisiana and to present them for the first time in an accessible critical and comparative framework” (1). The author obtained francophone recordings of the Lomax material from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore and English-language material from the LC. Using audio-editing software, Caffery created individual audio tracks for each song and, eventually, a digital database for much of the Louisiana material collected by the Lomaxes. He systematically transcribed and translated recordings, including song fragments and commentary, and tracked down families of those individuals the Lomaxes recorded to conduct oral history interviews for further context.³ Caffery then created a taxonomic system—based on five categories—through which he could analyze the materials: Cajun and Creole music, instrumentals, traditional French songs, English and American folk songs, and African American songs (7–14). And yet, rather than being organized around song types or motifs, geography becomes Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana’s guiding organizational framework.

With the exception of “Instrumental Music,” “Miscellaneous,” and “Unidentified Location,” Caffery organizes his chapters around ten parishes (counties) in the heart of “French” Louisiana and the artists hailing from those districts, all of which are presented in alphabetical order.⁴ Annotations begin with a brief biography of the artist, followed by song texts, then a close reading of lyrics, which are cross-referenced with extant catalogs of folk songs published in North America and Europe. Caffery’s text also periodically weaves in sociocultural and historical analysis with varying degrees of success.

The book’s inherent value lies in getting the Lomax materials out of the archive and into broader circulation while providing a navigable roadmap to the 1934 recordings. But Caffery also hopes to do more. “The Lomax recordings in Louisi- ana have not yet,” he laments, “generated a body of critical commentary comparable to the great collections of Appalachian folk song, such as Cecil Sharp’s English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians, or the five-volume critical editions of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore or the Vance Randolph collections of Ozark tales and songs brilliantly edited and annotated by Gershon Legman” (1). In some ways, Caffery’s book is an hommage to traditional folklore studies—an antiquarian endeavor, even by the author’s own admission, that he hopes places Louisiana’s vernacular music on par with America’s great folklore traditions.⁵

While this study excels in cross-referencing the Lomax materials with tropes in folk song catalogs, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana falls short on two fronts: defining terms, and, at times, sociohistorical analysis. “This study highlights the need for more discriminate terminology,” Caffery argues (300). And yet taxonomic categories such...