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Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)afc9999005-9582

The first day of April

Photograph: The first day of April, 1938-08.

Lomax 1938 Beaver Island recording/card: The first day of April. LOC item https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.9582/.

Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked

A rectangular card contains typewritten text arranged as a song title, singer and recording information, followed by an opening line and refrain. A solid black circular mark appears near the lower center of the card.

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); Green, J. W. (Singer)

1,485 × 907 px · JPEG 2000 · 66 KB

Subjects and keywords

Text in the image

Transcribed from the object itself.

2278
B

The first day of April
Sung by J. W. Green.
St. James, Beaver Island, Mich.,
Alan Lomax, Aug., 1938.

f.l. The first day of April, I shall
never forget.
      refr. And sing fal-di-dal-dal-daddle-
dee.

Taken from the record

Not observed in the image — supplied by the archive's own catalogue, and repeated here so the two stay distinguishable.

The catalogue record identifies this as a Library of Congress Alan Lomax field-recording catalogue card, dated August 1938, associated with recordist Alan Lomax and singer J. W. Green.

Rights and credit

Public domain (Library of Congress; no known restrictions)

Credit this to Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, J. W. (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); Green, J. W. (Singer)
Date
1938-08
Original
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/afc/afc9999005-9582/0640.jp2
Copy taken
2026-07-31
Title from
an article in this archive

The file

Renditions held
RenditionFormatExtentSizeSHA-256
MasterJPEG 20001,485 × 907 px66 KBc6af138170c7…

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); Green, J. W. (Singer). “The first day of April”. 1938-08. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/afc9999005-9582/. 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.