Mondo Knows Facts
A suitcase recorder saved thousands of songs
Alan Lomax travelled with portable gear to record music nobody was writing down His fieldwork captured work songs, blues and folk styles on disc and tape across several countries. Many performers became known because of those recordings. The archive still supports research and new releases. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: field-recordings, archives, folk
A suitcase recorder saved thousands of songs: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Alan Lomax travelled with portable gear to record music nobody was writing down. The figure is taken from Library of Congress, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.