The Man Who Recorded The World

Years later I would find out about the work of Alan Lomax in keeping this music alive long enough to find my ears. A few months ago I was asked to write up a new Lomax biography for the American Songwriter Magazine website…

Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded The World
By Jon Swzed
Penguin Group

New biography puts the life and work of Alan Lomax in the spotlight.

In his quest for distinctive American folk music, Alan Lomax brought the songs of Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters and Leadbelly to a larger audience, and it’s no exaggeration to suggest that without Lomax’ contribution there would’ve been no 1960’s folk music revival, no Bob Dylan and a radically different pop music landscape in the world today. With Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, author John Szwed illuminates the life and work of the titular folklorist, musicologist, author, archivist and promoter.

As in his excellent Sun Ra bio, Szwed fully immerses readers in Lomax’ world as he travels from his Texas birthplace, through the rural South during The Great Depression and up to New York’s bohemian scene in the 1960’s.

Read more here…

Joe Nolan <3

We were up late again last night, but were pleased to wake up early enough to enjoy a lovely day in The Old South.

After weeks of particularly brutal summer weather, Nashville is experiencing an unlikely respite with temps in the high 80′s and flagging spirits on the rise.

This weekend my pal Aaron and I checked out the new print of Breathless at the Belcourt on Friday night. The verdict? Amazing. The film has already opened and closed in a number of cities, but I believe it will continue touring for the remainder of this, its 50th Anniversary year.

Afterwards, we retired to The Street of Dreams where we drank a bottle of wine before I begged off of a longer evening with the idea that I wanted to have a productive weekend. Although I’ve had some trouble gathering traction on a few writing projects I have in the works. I did manage to create a new feature for this blog.

"Ha, ha, hmmmm...Stupid Muggles."

At the end of our upcoming posts you will find that I have returned to my classic Insomnia signature. In addition to the usual widgets I use to promote my musical projects, I’d also like to encourage you to check out a new venue we’ve opened on Amazon – The Sleepless Bookstore.

The bookstore will help us to tie our Sleepless Film Festival programming in with the brand new Sleepless Book Club which will make its debut in an upcoming post. The movies and books in the bookstore have all been hand-picked and relate directly to the content on this blog.

When you purchase my music or grab an interesting film or provocative book from the new store, you are directly supporting our efforts and becoming a part of the creating of these ongoing messages. Thank you in advance for your support.

"I can't wait to check out that bookstore."

To celebrate, here is another film we host on our YouTube Channel.

Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man is a one-hour documentary that serves as a wonderful character study of the titular man, but also of the titular bookstore. It is a funny and oddly touching film about writers, books, readers, age, eccentricity and the famous French literary destination Shakespeare and Company.

Here’s what the Open Culture blog had to say about the 2005 film:

Sylvia Beach first opened a bookshop with that name in 1918, and it soon became a home for artists of the “Lost Generation” (Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, Stein, etc.) and also famously published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. The shop eventually closed during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Yet a good decade later, an eccentric American named George Whitman established another English-language bookstore on the Left Bank and eventually rechristened it Shakespeare and Company. Whitman’s shop gave sanctuary to Beat writers – Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and the rest. And it’s this incarnation of the fabled bookstore that the documentary takes as its subject. Give the documentary some time above, and be sure to watch the last five minutes – unless you already know how to cut your hair with fire. Holy smokes!

Enjoy!

Be gentle in your sleepy hands on this world.

Be a killer in heaven.

Stay Awake!

Joe Nolan