Natural Rhythm is a multimedia music recording project that follows the path of the Great Migration from New Orleans to Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago, emulating the work of Alan Lomax.


In the summer of 2014, Abigail Nover and Tegan McDuffie drove 1,580 miles in a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla with no air conditioning, following the path of the Great Migration. Undertaking a project named “Natural Rhythm,” they were also following the footsteps of John and Alan Lomax. In the twentieth century John and Alan Lomax traveled the country and the world recording music for The Library of Congress. They recorded greats like Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton and preserved countless traditions that became available to the public. These archives serve as resource for scholarly endeavors, but include many recordings of enduring popularity and influence.

Alan Lomax’s two major journeys through the US took place in 1937 and again in 1959. Despite the fact that his work and methodology are highly controversial, his recordings have become staples of the understanding American folk and roots music. Since these trips, however, fieldwork of American folksong has become less common and certainly less popular, creating a gap in recorded sources. So, more than half a century later, Nover and McDuffie hit the road filled with curiosity and determination to document the current state of American folk music. Although the project was more Gonzo than Lomax, it examines how music has changed since the depression era and folk revival, and provides us with clues about what the future may hold.

In order to identify how American folk and roots music has evolved in the past fifty-five years, they traveled from New Orleans to Chicago, recording music and interviews to create the beginning of a new anthology of today’s American music. Over six weeks of travel, they visited and recorded in Louisiana (New Orleans, Opelousas, Eunice, Plaissance, Laffayette), Mississippi  (Greenville, Merigold, Clarksdale, Greenwood, Como, Cleveland), Tennessee (Memphis), Missouri (St. Louis, Webster Groves), and Illinois (Chicago). They recorded thirty-one sessions, accumulated fifty tracks of music, and twenty-eight interviews. The people and music recorded represent a large spectrum. The youngest person recorded was thirteen and the oldest was ninety-three. The music included in the anthology covers genres including blues, bluegrass, jazz, ragtime, country, and old time.

The breadth of the project, as it stands currently, is wide, but ultimately incomplete. The project only scratches the surface and calls attention to a need for a much larger and more in-depth project to further record and especially to analyze the current, and swiftly changing state of American folk and roots music. To continue the project, it would be necessary to record in more regions of the United States and for longer periods of time in each location. With the amount of time and money allotted, this project serves its purpose as a small collection of examples through which to begin to analyze and understand the state of folk and roots music in 2014. 

The project creates a new context that allows for examination. The scholar and media theorist, Jonathan Sterne writes in his seminal book, The Audible Past, “Recording is a form of exteriority: it does not preserve a preexisting sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events for the possibility of preservation and repetition.”[1] Sterne’s apt description hits an important point. This project and Lomax’s alike are new creations that can be used as a point of comparison, but cannot account for the totality of the live performances that they captured. The collection can, however provide a window not only into the past, but also into what lies ahead for continued evolution of American music.

The way we consume music on a daily basis has changed drastically in the past decade with the advent of social media, including YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, and the increasing commonality of headphone use. The availability of music has increased both in terms of ease of access and extensiveness of available resources. People have access to music from virtually any location and time period so long as they know how to search for it on the Internet. Technology is becoming a new form of oral tradition. So what does this mean for American folk music today? This anthology explores the answer to that question.


[1] Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 332. Print. 

'Natural Rhythm' is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of  'Natural Rhythm' must be made payable to Fractured Atlas only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.




 'Natural Rhythm' is sponsored by the Undergraduate Research Office of Carnegie Mellon University in the form of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.