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Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)afc9999005-9551

Don't judge a man by the clothes that he wears

Photograph: Don't judge a man by the clothes that he wears, 1938-08.

Lomax 1938 Beaver Island recording/card: Don't judge a man by the clothes that he wears. LOC item https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.9551/.

Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked

A rectangular typewritten card is photographed against a dark background. The card contains a song title, a singer attribution, location and recording information, a reference number, and a short explanatory note. A solid black circular mark appears near the lower center.

A model wrote this. It was shown the image and the catalogue record together, and asked to keep them apart — what it saw is here, what the record told it is under "taken from the record" below. It is still wrong often enough to matter, about who is pictured, where, when, and what is happening. Read it as a way to find the image, never as evidence about it. If you can correct it, please do: write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com, or see how corrections work. Someone who recognises a face or a shoreline knows more than the model did.

Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Gallagher, Andrew E. (Mary Ann) (Singer)

1,485 × 907 px · JPEG 2000 · 66 KB

Subjects and keywords

Text in the image

Transcribed from the object itself.

2267
A1
Don't judge a man by the clothes that
he wears
Song by Andrew E. (Mary Ann)
Gallagher.
St. James, Beaver Island, Mich. Alan
Lomax, Aug., 1938.
f.l. Don't judge a man by the cost of
his clothing.

Could not make out

Stated rather than guessed at.

The short abbreviation before the final note appears to read "f.l."; some characters in the card text are obscured or degraded.

Rights and credit

Public domain (Library of Congress; no known restrictions)

Credit this to Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Gallagher, Andrew E. (Mary Ann) (Singer) when you use it.

Material goes off the web without anyone deciding that it should: a host lapses, a gallery is retired, a link stops resolving. Holding a copy — with its provenance, its checksum and its holder's terms recorded beside it — is much of why this archive exists. If you are looking for something whose original has since gone, write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com and a full-size copy of what is held here will be sent to you.

Recorded verbatim from the provenance sidecar taken at retrieval — this archive does not restate a holder's terms in its own words, does not add a restriction the holder did not state, and does not abridge one.

Provenance

Held by
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center
Collection
Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)
Named on the record
Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Gallagher, Andrew E. (Mary Ann) (Singer)
Date
1938-08
Original
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/afc/afc9999005-9551/0609.jp2
Copy taken
2026-07-31
Title from
an article in this archive

The file

Renditions held
RenditionFormatExtentSizeSHA-256
MasterJPEG 20001,485 × 907 px66 KBbd2998e3b49c…

Checksums are the values recorded when each copy was taken.

Download

The archive holds its own copy of that file and will supply it on request; it is not re-served here, because the holder serves it better and a second copy is a second thing to go stale.

In this archive

Cite this

Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Gallagher, Andrew E. (Mary Ann) (Singer). “Don't judge a man by the clothes that he wears”. 1938-08. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/afc9999005-9551/. copy retrieved 2026-07-31.

Built only from what the archive recorded: the names on the record, the title as recorded, the date if one was recorded, this page, and the date the copy was taken. Nothing is filled in to satisfy a citation style.