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Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)afc9999005-9624

The frog went a-courting

Photograph: The frog went a-courting, 1938-08.

Lomax 1938 Beaver Island recording/card: The frog went a-courting. LOC item https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.9624/.

Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked

A pale typewritten card is photographed against a dark border. Several lines of text fill the upper portion, with a handwritten arrow above them and a large black circular mark near the bottom.

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 · 65 KB

Subjects and keywords

Text in the image

Transcribed from the object itself.

2293
A2

The Frog went a-courting
Sung by J. W. Green.
St. James, Beaver Island, Mich.,
Alan Lomax, Aug., 1938.

P.1. My old man he's gone to France.

Taken from the record

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

Catalogued as a photograph titled “The frog went a-courting,” dated August 1938, from the Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards collection. The record credits Alan Lomax as recordist and J. W. Green as singer; the holding institution is the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. The catalogue record identifies the source item as LOC AFC9999005.9624 and states that the image is public domain.

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/afc9999005-9624/0682.jp2
Copy taken
2026-07-31
Title from
an article in this archive

The file

Renditions held
RenditionFormatExtentSizeSHA-256
MasterJPEG 20001,485 × 907 px65 KBa6765052a6e4…

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 frog went a-courting”. 1938-08. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/afc9999005-9624/. 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.