- Date
- 1939
- Eras
- Modern era
- Concepts
- music-folkloreheritagehistoriography
- Within
- Beaver Island
Summary
This 1939 Library of Congress annual-report excerpt contains Alan Lomax’s account of his August–November 1938 Michigan fieldwork. In the Beaver Island passage he says that Ivan Walton introduced him to Dominick Gallagher and Johnny Green, calls them “two remarkable Irish singers,” and characterizes Green as an exceptional ballad singer. Lomax also writes that the Beaver Island singers were all Irish.
What it establishes
The report is contemporaneous evidence of how Lomax and the Archive of American Folk-Song described the Beaver Island session, and it connects the session to Walton’s local guidance. It also records Lomax’s description of Green’s reported repertory and the group’s Irish identification.
Evidence and limits
This is a fieldworker’s institutional report. It does not supply a complete roster of Beaver Island performers, individual song transcriptions, exact attribution within every recording, language-of-performance analysis, kinship, or the singers’ own full account of identity and tradition. The phrase “all Irish” is retained as Lomax’s 1939 characterization, not expanded into a complete demographic claim.
See also
Sources
- Held Library of Congress page-image export. The report describes a Michigan recording survey in August–November 1938, its collaborators, and its Beaver Island stop; it is an institutional and fieldworker report rather than item-level recording metadata or a complete social history.documents · lomax_afs_annual_report_1939
- Project provenance sidecar for the held annual-report page images.The provenance identifies the Library of Congress master image and the Beaver Island passage. OCR was checked against the held page image; the report’s wording remains attributed to Lomax. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.documents · lomax_afs_annual_report_1939 · 0005.provenance
Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “Archive of American Folk-Song annual report excerpt, 1939”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/archive-of-american-folk-song-annual-report-1939/, accessed [date], citing Alan Lomax, “From the Report of the Assistant in Charge,” in Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1939, pp. 218–225. (and 1 further source listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-02. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “Archive of American Folk-Song annual report excerpt, 1939”RIS for “Archive of American Folk-Song annual report excerpt, 1939”