Announcing The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert, an album that premiers unreleased recordings by Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young. The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert is available for pre-order now, and will be released digitally and on CD on June 14th. The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert is available for pre-order here.

Captured on a Nagra tape recorder and a good Sony condenser microphone by noted field recordist Peter Siegel, the entire April 1965 Friends of Old Time Music concert is presented here for the first time, each song a revelation. “It's rare that you could put out every song from the concert and they're all good,” says Siegel. The concert recordings presents a riveting, historic look at the intersection of Black folk traditions and civil rights activism. The folk songs and spirituals of the Georgia Sea Islands Singers, led by Jones and Davis, have influenced everyone from Jerry Garcia to Afrofuturist Folkways artist Jake Blount. These songs of the Gullah Geechee people of Georgia even today retain deep connections to Africa, and were encoded with powerful messages of resistance to slavery and oppression. (Some of these songs, like musician and activist Mable Hillery’s “Marching on the Mississippi Line,” were more explicit.) The concert also featured the country blues of legendary singer and guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi cane fife player Ed Young, and folklorist Alan Lomax, who acted as emcee.

Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers gained wide renown during the 1960s and ‘70s for their powerful performances of traditional songs from the African American Gullah Geechee community on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Most in the group were born and raised on St. Simons, and could trace their ancestry to the enslaved people from West and Central Africa who worked on the island’s cotton plantations. Throughout the ‘60s, the Georgia Sea Island Singers were prominent voices in the civil rights movement, bringing hundreds of years of Black musical tradition to bear on a pivotal time in American history. The album showcases a variety of traditional music from the Island and beyond, including stirring work songs, emotionally charged spirituals, jubilant songs for children, and revelatory renditions of Mississippi blues.