Roots music

IN the fall of 1937, 22-year-old Alan Lomax loaded a 350-pound recording device, a carton of blank acetate discs and his wife into a jalopy and drove through Kentucky's Cumberland Gap to a mining town called Middlesboro. It was a grueling journey. The roads were unpaved and often eroded; the well-dressed and well-spoken Easterner was a magnet for attention -- welcome and otherwise. He ran out of discs and then ran out of money. In one village, he was threatened by a 60-year-old with a knife.

But Lomax was unshakable. Earlier that year, he had persuaded his boss at the Library of Congress to finance a trip, as he termed it, to "the heart of the mountains," to find "the music of the American pioneer, in all degrees of purity." Radio and mass-market culture were making rapid inroads across the country, and Lomax, who had a flair for drama, painted the trip in the grandest of terms. Nothing less than the history -- and consequently, the future -- of the folk song was at stake.

In his new book, "Chasing the Rising Sun," Ted Anthony implies that the young "songcatcher" who would later head the library's Archive of American Folk Song may have understated his case. By the late '30s, the mines in Kentucky were bringing unprecedented wealth to communities like Middlesboro and, along with it, a flood of outsiders. There weren't any pure folk songs left -- assuming, as Lomax seemed to, that such a thing ever existed in the first place. Most of what he found in the mining camps was a mishmash of styles collected by ramblers, card sharks and prospectors.

Some sang like angels. Lomax had particular success with Georgia Turner, a slight, pretty teenage girl who lived with her family in a one-room log cabin outside Middlesboro. As Anthony painstakingly recounts, she performed two songs for Lomax in 1937; the second and more interesting of the pair was a 98-second lament in a sliding blues scale. It was her signature tune, he writes, and it was delivered in a "sad" voice:

\o7There is a house in New Orleans

they call the Risin' Sun.

It's been the ruin of many poor girl

and me, oh God, for one.

\f7

"Chasing the Rising Sun" is a strange and stirring thing: a history book -- and a decently sized one, at that -- that begins and ends in ambiguity. Turner's song, which was eventually made famous in the 1960s by the British band the Animals, is untraceable before the turn of the 20th century. For his part, even Lomax could not conclusively place its origin.