Take in the sounds and histories of Alabama with Smithsonian Folkways with this field guide curated by Burgin Mathews. Take “a deep and glorious dive into a few distinctive and inspiring wells of tradition”: listen to his playlist and read the accompanying essay below!

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This “field guide” offers an intro to the historic sounds of Alabama, as reflected in the catalog of Smithsonian Folkways. The original Folkways mission—to uplift what label founder Moses Asch called “people’s music” and to document, indeed, the entire “world of sound”—is evident throughout these Alabama recordings. Here, ordinary people sing field hollers, spirituals, and protest songs; children play games; elders worship; a country brass band makes a joyful noise; and civil rights foot soldiers use their voices to enact social change.

Certainly this playlist is not a comprehensive survey of Alabama music. The state’s rich legacies in both Sacred Harp singing and country music barely appear in the Smithsonian Folkways catalog, and other essential traditions are not represented at all. Alabama can boast long and influential histories in gospel quartet singing, old-time fiddling, blues and boogie-woogie piano, big band swing, free improv and the avant-garde, collegiate marching bands, and more. The state is the home of Muscle Shoals soul, the birthplace of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips and gospel music’s Dorothy Love Coates, the launching pad of intergalactic bandleader Sun Ra. More recently, Alabama has witnessed an explosion of celebrated songwriters and performers: Drive-By Truckers, Brittany Howard, Jason Isbell, Waxahatchee, Lee Bains, and others have all developed their unique voices and visions from their Alabama roots.

If this playlist doesn’t map the full diversity of Alabama’s musical styles, what it offers instead is a deep and glorious dive into a few distinctive and inspiring wells of tradition. In the early 1950s, researchers Harold Courlander and Frederic Ramsey, Jr. documented the state’s rural Black music traditions in two extensive series of Folkways albums. In the 1960s, the Folkways label chronicled the unfolding civil rights movement in real time, releasing audio reports from the movement’s central Southern battlegrounds; in the years since, Smithsonian Folkways has remained an essential resource for the music of the Black freedom struggle in America. This playlist leans hard into these themes, with briefer excursions into the origins of jazz, Alabama poetry, and other homegrown sounds.

Harold Courlander—an early, frequent, and prolific Folkways collaborator—began recording west Alabama musicians in January 1950, and for the next several years produced a series of albums titled (in language now outdated) Negro Folk Music of Alabama. The recordings centered around Alabama’s Sumter County, home for decades to a rich community of singers. It was also the home of Ruby Pickens Tartt, a white folklorist, writer, librarian and artist who had long championed the Black singers and musicians in her community. As early as the 1930s, she had served as a kind of ambassador to John and Alan Lomax in their efforts to document the region’s music for the Library of Congress, and she’d supplied a wealth of material to writer Carl Carmer for his best-selling Stars Fell on Alabama. Now she served as Courlander’s guide, introducing him into a vital network of singers; she also provided liner notes for the 1953 album Ring Games: Line Games and Play Party Songs of Alabama.

Sumter County’s most celebrated singers, Vera Hall and Dock Reed, recorded for Courlander an album’s worth of spirituals. (Hall also recorded, on other occasions, a variety of song types for both Lomaxes; her 1959 recording of “Trouble So Hard” would become in the year 2000 an unlikely international hit as the basis of Moby’s dance single, “Natural Blues.”) Annie Grace Horn Dodson preserved several wordless field calls remembered from her childhood. Such calls had been used by laborers since slavery to communicate across long distances; in addition to the aching call heard here, Downson shared with Courlander and Tartt calls she had learned from her parents, both of whom were born enslaved.

Enoch Brown shared his own characteristic and plaintive call, which was well known around Livingston: “If the times don’t get no better here,” Brown sings, “I’m down the road I’m gone.” In “Now Your Man Done Gone” (also recorded as “Another Man Done Gone” by Hall), Willie Turner depicts a world over which the county prison farm looms. At the time of the recording, Turner himself was detained in a Livingston prison camp, and he is joined on the song by two unidentified incarcerated singers.

The larger-than-life local character Rich Amerson recorded extensively for Courlander; his stories and songs are given two full albums in the series. Amerson also provided the model for the title character in Courlander’s 1962 novel, The Big Old World of Richard Creeks. On “Come on up to Bright Glory” (heard here), he is joined by his sister, Earthy Anne Coleman.

Other recordings resulting from the collaboration of Courlander, Tartt, and Sumter County singers included church songs (“Move Members Move”), children’s play songs (“I’m Goin’ Up North”), and blues (“Salty Dog Blues”).

As Courlander was documenting the sounds of Sumter County, Folkways contributor Frederic Ramsey, Jr., was conceiving a parallel series of his own: his ten-album series Music from the South focused, for the most part, on older singers and styles from across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. (A book, 1960’s Been Here and Gone, expanded further on the project.) Ramsey devoted three of the ten albums to Perry County’s Horace Sprott, a powerful singer, storyteller, and harmonica player with a seemingly bottomless repertoire of songs. Ramsey, who had recorded Leadbelly’s extensive last sessions, considered Sprott to be on par with that celebrated artist. Other singers and musicians documented by Ramsey include vocalist Dorothy Melton, the Starlight Gospel Singers, and—in a pounding, Sanctified “Precious Lord, Hold My Hand”—members of Marion, Alabama’s tiny First Independent Holy Church of God – Unity – Prayer.

Best known for his work as an early and influential historian of jazz, Frederic Ramsey, Jr. hoped in his southern recording trips to document the rural traditions that had preceded and led to the development of that genre. In country brass bands like Perry County’s Lapsey Band, he heard what he considered a living link to the nineteenth century roots of jazz; social bands like these had flourished in Black communities in the wake of the Civil War but, nearly one hundred years later, they survived in the practice of only a few rural elders.

Another Folkways regular, Sam Charters, explored the roots of jazz through the commercial recordings of the 1920s and ’30s. (For Charters’ own Alabama field recordings, see 1957’s American Skiffle Bands.) On the 1977 compilation Jazz: Some Cities and Towns, Charters spotlighted a diversity of regional expressions from the first years of recorded jazz. In the liner notes, he resists the conventional notion that all jazz derived from New Orleans and its diaspora. “There was music in other cities as well,” Charters writes, “and as jazz grew to maturity there were other styles and moods of playing that extended the range of the first orchestral jazz forms.”

Representing Birmingham’s jazz culture on Charters’ compilation is a 1927 tune, “Congo Stomp,” by Frank Bunch and his Fuzzy Wuzzies, a team of musicians trained by that city’s legendary John T. “Fess” Whatley. Though the Fuzzy Wuzzies themselves quickly faded into obscurity, many of the band’s players went on to successful careers: trombonist Joe Britton worked with Bessie Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, while saxophonist Teddy Hill launched his own popular orchestra in New York City, then became the influential manager of Minton’s Playhouse, helping oversee the development of bebop culture.

Still another link to the beginnings of jazz is provided by a 1958 album by Katharine Handy Lewis, daughter of W. C. Handy. Born in Florence, Alabama, the celebrated “Father of the Blues” was working as a teacher and band director at Alabama A&M College near Huntsville when his daughter was born in 1902. (Handy’s tenure at the school was brief: after he introduced a ragtime arrangement into a chapel assembly performance, the college president requested his resignation.) Lewis grew up performing her father’s songs, which she recorded on the collection W. C. Handy Blues: Sung By His Daughter Katharine Handy Lewis in the Traditional Style. She had conceived of the album as a gift to the old man himself, but Handy regrettably died just before its release.

The Alabama projects of Courlander and Ramsey, though not explicitly political in nature, are compelling companions to Folkways’ later civil rights movement recordings. Many of the spirituals, hollers, and work songs recorded by Vera Hall, Horace Sprott, and other Alabama singers reflect themes of resistance that stretched back to slavery and resonated through decades of struggle to come. Some of the old songs themselves took on new words and meaning in the modern movement. In “Come on up to Bright Glory,” Amerson and Coleman had sung of a better world beyond this one—

—while at Brown’s Chapel in Selma, 1965, congregants demanded a better world down here, right now:

Through songs, sermons, interview segments, liner notes, and photographs, Folkways’ civil rights albums presented living portraits of a movement in progress. Today the recordings survive as powerful historical documents, and they offer resources, inspiration, and models for contemporary activists and artists. The albums also demonstrate the ways in which the music grew directly and uniquely from the diverse communities where the movement took shape. Despite their many shared aims, places like Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma each were colored by their own particular conflicts and campaigns, their local organizers and antagonists, their homegrown song leaders and longstanding worship traditions. The music of each place reflected these and other factors, adapting local traditions and resources to meet the needs of the movement.

On the 1961 album We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-Ins, The Montgomery Gospel Trio, comprised of three teenage activists, harmonized around spirituals and direct calls to action. In Birmingham, the mass meetings and marches were fueled by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Choir, directed by the dynamic Carlton Reese. Vocal soloists Mamie Brown and Cleo Kennedy brought their own signature songs and styles to energize the Birmingham campaign. During 1965’s Selma to Montgomery march, two young girls movingly sang the anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round,” confronting in their lyrics Bloody Sunday’s tear gas and calling out by name Governor George Wallace himself. In a radio broadcast recorded with recent veterans of that march (and released as WNEW’s Story of Selma), Len Chandler, Pete Seeger, and the Freedom Voices singing group demonstrated the ways in which singers responded directly to the specifics of their moment. “We’ve Got a Rope That’s a Berlin Wall” (heard here) is just one example of a place-specific, moment-specific song from the ongoing struggle.

Another response to the civil rights movement comes from Arhoolie Records and blues musician Johnie Lewis, a transplant to Chicago from Eufaula, Alabama. Lewis’ album Alabama Slide Guitar, recorded in 1970 and ’71, includes two tributes to the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr. One of these, “I Got to Climb a High Mountain,” alludes to King’s final speech, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before King’s assassination.

The Arhoolie catalog (acquired by Smithsonian Folkways in 2016) also includes multiple recordings by two of Alabama’s greatest musical exports and expats: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and the Maddox Brothers and Rose. Born and raised in Ariton, Alabama, Thornton scored an iconic and influential hit in 1952 with the original, pre-Elvis “Hound Dog”; “I’m Feeling Alright,” heard here, comes from her 1966 sessions with the Muddy Water Blues Band. Billed as “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band,” the Maddox Brothers and Rose had left the sharecropping life in Depression-era Boaz, Alabama, hitching and hoboing their way to California, where they established themselves as raucous and spangled, utterly unforgettable country music originals. This playlist includes their version of “Move it On Over” by fellow Alabamian Hank Williams.

On his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, released on Folkways in 1952, Harry Smith included two 1928 recordings from Alabama’s historic Sacred Harp singing tradition. “Rocky Road”—presented by the generically named “Alabama Sacred Harp Singers”— appeared on both that anthology and on the Harold Courlander compilation, Folk Music U.S.A.: Vol. 1. Barely discernible on the track is the sound of an accompanying organ—something of a studio anomaly, since in practice Sacred Harp is a decidedly a cappella singing tradition.

In addition to preserving people’s music, the Folkways label has long devoted itself to poetry and the spoken word. Raised in Birmingham in the shadow of U. S. Steel, where his father worked as an executive, the social activist and poet John Beecher became a champion for the exploited, the persecuted, and the poor. Poems like “If I Forget Thee O'Birmingham!” and “Ensley, Alabama” (heard here) reflect Jefferson County’s complex legacies of exploitative labor conditions, racial violence, and industrial decay. Another Birmingham-born poet, Margaret Walker, made her Folkways debut on 1954’s Anthology of Negro Poets; in 1975, she released three full Folkways albums, performing her own poems (including this playlist’s “For My People”) alongside the works of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson. Along with the civil rights movement recordings included in this playlist, the poetry of both Beecher and Walker embodies Alabama’s long and often obscured history of radical politics and activism.

It’s an honor to compile this list, since I can easily and honestly say that Folkways Records changed my life. I was sixteen years old when I first got my hands on the label’s print, mail-order catalog (circa 1994), and I began sending away as often as I could for its custom-made cassettes. Moses Asch’s ambitious and outrageous project to record “the sound of the world” absolutely thrilled me, and I was especially drawn to any Folkways album that documented the sounds and history of my own home state. Even though I’d grown up in Montgomery, whose bus boycott was one of the civil rights movement’s first major milestones, much of my own early exposure to the history of that movement came through the music, speeches, and liner notes compiled in Guy and Candie Carawans’ documentary albums for Folkways. As a teenager in the ’90s, I recognized my home in these albums, but it also felt like “History,” something more distant than it really was. I could not have imagined then that I would myself one day get to know some of the singers whose voices appear on those albums—whose voices helped fuel the movement and, in turn, helped change the world.

Today I live in Birmingham, where the Carlton Reese Memorial Unity Choir continues to share the songs and stories of the movement. In that group, younger singers appear alongside original members of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Choir and other local foot soldiers. Cleo Kennedy—whose interpretations of both “City Called Heaven” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” provided the templates for Joan Baez’s performances of those songs—still remains active as a singer. And Mamie Brown Mason, one of my absolute heroes, remained a central force in the choir until her death in 2020. On her signature song, “I’m On My Way to Freedom Land,” her powerhouse vocals continued undiminished to the end, her singing every bit as fierce in her eighties as it was in this playlist’s 1963 recording.

My teenage encounters with Folkways Records fundamentally rewired the ways I thought about both music and place. Even Sam Charters’ brief musings on regional jazz scenes and sounds planted a seed in me long ago, a curiosity about what might have made Birmingham’s or Montgomery’s or Mobile’s early jazz cultures distinctive. My book Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America (in which the Fuzzy Wuzzies and Sam Charters both make brief appearances) was published in November 2023, the culmination of curiosities sparked nearly three decades ago by some old typewritten, photocopied, stapled, and folded-up Folkways liner notes.

In short, Folkways forever opened up my world, even helped me better understand my own home, and set me down a path I still travel today—as a writer and radio host and documentarian of the South’s musical life and culture(s). If some kid today, just one, happens to stumble upon this playlist and finds the world similarly expanded or exploded, I’d be pretty damn delighted.

Track List:

1 - Enoch Brown, “Complaint Call” (from Music Down Home: An Introduction to Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. (1965))

2 - Annie Grace Horn Dodson, “Field Calls” (from Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 1: Secular Music (1951))

3 - Big Mama Thornton & Muddy Waters Blues Band, “I’m Feeling Alright - Fast Version” (from Big Mama Thornton with the Muddy Waters Blues Band - 1966 (2004))

4 - The Montgomery Gospel Trio, The Nashville Quartet, and Guy Carawan, “There’s a Meeting Here Tonight” (from We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-Ins (1961))

5 - Willie Turner, “Now Your Man Done Gone” (from Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 1: Secular Music (1951))

6 - John Beecher, “Ensley, Alabama” (from Report to the Stockholders: Poems by John Beecher (1977))

7 - Horace Sprott, “Dives and Lazarus - Dip Your Finger Down in the Water and Cool My Parcherin’ Tongue” (from Music from the South, Vol. 4: Horace Sprott, 3 (1955))

8 - Dorothy Melton, “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me” (from Music from the South, Vol. 8: Young Songsters (1956))

9 - First Independent Holy Church of God and Unity (Marion, Al.), “Precious Lord, Hold My Hand” (from Music from the South, Vol. 9: Song and Worship (1956))

10 - The Lapsey Band, “When I Lay My Burden Down” (from Music from the South, Vol. 1: Country Brass Bands (1955))

11 - Frank Bunch and the Fuzzy Wuzzies, “Congo Stomp” (from Jazz: Some Cities and Towns (1977))

12 - Katharine Handy Lewis, “Chantez les Bas” (from W. C. Handy Blues: Sung by His Daughter Katharine Handy Lewis in Traditional Style (1958))

13 - East York School (Ala.), “I'm Goin’ Up North” (from Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 1: Secular Music (1951))

14 - Two little Girls at March, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round” (from Freedom Songs: Selma, Alabama (1965))

15 - Johnie Lewis, “I Got to Climb a High Mountain (About Dr. Martin Luther King)” (from Alabama Slide Guitar (1997))

16 - Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, “Rocky Road: Shape-Note Singing” (from Folk Music U.S.A.: Vol. 1 (1958))

17 - Vera Hall and Dock Reed, “Low Down the Chariot and Let Me Ride” (from Spirituals with Dock Reed and Vera Hall Ward (1953))

18 - Red Willie Smith, “Salty Dog Blues” (from Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 1: Secular Music (1951))

19 - Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Move It On Over” (from America's Most Colorful Hillbilly Band (1993))

20 - The Starlight Gospel Singers, “Lookin’ for My Jesus” (from Music from the South, Vol. 8: Young Songsters (1956))

21 - Mamie Brown and Carlton Reece, “I'm on My Way” (from Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs (1990))

22 - Cleo Kennedy, Carlton Reese, “City Called Heaven” (from Lest We Forget, Vol. 2: Birmingham, Alabama, 1963 - Mass Meeting (1980))

23 - The Freedom Voices, “We’ve Got a Rope That’s a Berlin Wall” (from WNEW's Story of Selma (1965))

24 - Rosie Hibler and family, “Move Members Move” (from Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 2: Religious Music (1956))

25 - Margaret Walker, “For My People” (from The Poetry of Margaret Walker (1975))

26 - Rich Amerson and Earthy Anne Coleman, “Come On Up to Bright Glory” (from Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 4: Rich Amerson, Pt. 2 (1955))

27 - Congregation of Brown Chapel, “If You Miss Me From the Back of the Bus” (from Freedom Songs: Selma, Alabama (1965))

28 - Berenice Ford, Eunice Ford, and Bessie Lee Daniels, “Head-Shoulder Baby” (from Music from the South, Vol. 5: Song, Play, and Dance (1956))