Archivists Art and Margo Rosenbaum spent half a century recording obscure artists from the backwoods: parlour tunes, church hymns, slide blues, chain gang songs, Southern gospel and creepy country ballads. Complete with scholarly tome, the result is a riveting document of an all-but-vanished culture. The recordings are amazing, super intimate and personal, many of them a cappella, lots of them including the various bits of conversation that took place before and after, making it feel like you were sitting right there on the porch. The collection is divided into four discs, each with a particular focus, instrumental and dance, blues, religious, and one disc that is a sort of sampling of all of the above and more, even including some Mexican folk, a German traditional, and other songs that maybe didn’t fit perfectly into those genres.
Disc 1:Survey
Disc 2:Religion
Disc 3:Blues
Disc 4:Instrumental and Dance
