Michigan-I-O: Alan Lomax and the 1938 Library of Congress Folk-Song Expedition

A sweeping portrait of Michigan’s working people, from loggers and sailors to immigrant farmers and Detroit bluesmen.

In the summer of 1938, a 23-year-old Alan Lomax set out on one of the most ambitious folklife surveys ever undertaken in the Upper Midwest. Over three months he recorded more than 250 acetate discs and eight reels of film across Michigan and Wisconsin, documenting French-Canadian and maritime ballads, bawdy lumberjack songs, Delta blues from Detroit, Serbian and Lithuanian lyric pieces, and dance tunes played by Finnish accordionists and Native fiddlers.

Michigan-I-O: Alan Lomax and the 1938 Library of Congress Folk-Song Expedition serves as an introduction to this remarkable journey. The set brings together rare audio and film, much of it never before published, offering an unprecedented portrait of a region Lomax himself described as “the most fertile source” of American folklore.

This release pairs naturally with Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946, together offering the most complete sonic portrait of the immigrant and working-class cultures that shaped the region’s folk traditions.

What’s Included

• 28-tracks of audio
• newly remastered field recordings from 1938 (with one earlier John Lomax cylinder from 1933 for context)
• Performances by Calvin Frazier, Sampson Pittman, Clara and Lonnie Frazier, Dominick Gallagher, Exilia Bellaire, Capt. Asel Trueblood, Edwina & Stephanie Lewandowski, and many others
• View the complete tracklist here: [Insert hosted PDF link]
• 4 exceedingly rare reels of film, among the only surviving moving-image documents of Michigan folk culture in the 1930s

Compiler Notes

The recordings were originally made by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture, now preserved at the American Folklife Center. They stand as some of the earliest ethnographic sound documents of the Upper Midwest.

Praise & Reviews

“The Lomax Michigan recordings capture a crossroads moment, when the voices of lumbermen, immigrants, and bluesmen resonated together, defining a regional culture too often overlooked in American folk history.”

— Sing Out!

“A vivid mosaic of Michigan’s working people, and one of the most important folk song expeditions in the Lomax legacy.” — Detroit Free Press