Ballad Hunter

In 1941 the Library of Congress presented a series of ten radio programs for "explaining and illustrating the folk songs of the American people as they are sung by the people themselves." Narrated by legendary folklorist John Lomax, the shows incorporated some of his experiences, from riding "night-herd with cowboys on the Western plains" to joining "farm hands at barn dances in many sections of the American countryside." The show was innovative in that it used the actual sound recordings along with Lomax's comments, a technique they compared at the time to "that used in the motion picture industry, each recording being edited and reedited until the exact portions wanted from the field recordings had been extracted." Amazingly, this was done on discs, before tape recordings were used in the US.

The WNYC Archives has obtained a set of these broadcast discs in good condition and we now make these legendary recordings available online.