Summary
The Beaver Island portion of the Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings contains 71 Library of Congress catalog records for sound recordings made at Saint James between 24 and 29 August 1938. The local archive preserves the machine-readable item metadata for all 179 records in the directory, but 108 of those are still images of catalog cards and are modeled separately in Alan Lomax Beaver Island catalog-card photographs (1933–1938).
Each of the 71 sound-recording records now has an item-level article under
kb/articles/documents/lomax/. Those articles preserve the LOC item identifier,
catalog title, call number, date, contributor labels and exact local JSON path;
they do not split compound catalog titles or promote catalog labels into
independent biographies.
What is held
The recordings are field documentation of song and spoken or musical tradition in the island’s Irish-American community. The catalog identifies performers, collectors, titles, dates, genres, media, and Library of Congress identifiers; it does not make this article a claim that every performer or song has been fully identified by the present corpus. Names such as Patrick McDonough, Alan Lomax, Andrew Gallagher, and J. W. Green remain catalog metadata until separate person articles are supported by fuller sources.
The date span is the cataloged recording span, not the date of publication or the date on which the collection was digitized. A representative record is Tommy Boyle, recorded 27 August 1938 on Beaver Island and cataloged as a sound recording by the American Folklife Center.
Open questions
- The 108 catalog-card photographs still need item-level cross-links to their corresponding sound-recording records where the LOC identifiers make that relationship explicit.
- The corpus needs listening notes, rights review, and song-level comparison before making claims about melody, language, transmission, or provenance.
- The relationship between the recording sessions and specific Irish-arriving families should be researched from family histories and community sources, not inferred from catalog surnames alone.
See also
- Alan Lomax Beaver Island catalog-card photographs (1933–1938)
- Irish settlement of Beaver Island
- Saint James
Sources
- Library of Congress, Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings (AFC 1939/007), Beaver Island sound-recording item metadata, 24–29 August 1938.Local inventory contains 179 item.json records: 71 sound recordings and 108 catalog-card images. This article counts only the 71 records whose metadata identifies the original format as sound recording. The representative URL is the Tommy Boyle item; each item retains its own Library of Congress identifier in its local JSON.audio · lomax_michigan_1938_beaver_island
- Library of Congress, Tommy Boyle, AFC 1939/007: AFS 02289 A, recorded 27 August 1938.Representative held item: Patrick McDonough performer and Alan Lomax collector; field recording made at Saint James, Beaver Island.audio · lomax_michigan_1938_beaver_island · afc1939007_afs02289a · item