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Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)afc9999005-9654

Sentence to death

Photograph: Sentence to death, 1938-08.

Lomax 1938 Beaver Island recording/card: Sentence to death. LOC item https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.9654/.

Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked

A rectangular light-colored card fills the image. Typewritten lines include a title, a singer attribution, a location, and a date, with catalog numbers at upper left. A dark 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); 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.

2300
B,
2301
A
Sentence to death
Sung by Andrew E. (Mary Ann)
Gallagher.
St. James, Beaver Island, Mich.,
Alan Lomax, Aug., 1938.

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 photograph associated with the Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards collection, held by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. The record dates the item to August 1938 and attributes the recording to Alan Lomax and Andrew E. Gallagher.

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/afc9999005-9654/0712.jp2
Copy taken
2026-07-31
Title from
an article in this archive

The file

Renditions held
RenditionFormatExtentSizeSHA-256
MasterJPEG 20001,485 × 907 px66 KB8fd3417e13df…

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). “Sentence to death”. 1938-08. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/afc9999005-9654/. 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.