Discovering keepers of folk music
Decades ago, an Austin family loved singing songs passed down from ancestors. As a result, those cultural treasures live on.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 12:39 p.m. Monday, April 26, 2010
Published: 6:07 a.m. Monday, April 26, 2010
It sure seemed quiet for 10 a.m. on a weekday, when John A. Lomax, who recorded folk songs for the Library of Congress, knocked on the front door of a six-room shanty on the northern bank of the Colorado River. Maggie Gant answered, still in her bedclothes. The children were still asleep, the mother of eight whispered.
"Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn't go to bed until 2 in the morning," she told Lomax, which he recalled in "Our Singing Country," his 1941 book that contained four songs collected from the Gants.
"The singing kept us so happy," Maggie Gant told Lomax, "we couldn't go to sleep."
It was 1934, during the depths of the Depression, but the Gant family of dispossessed sharecroppers was rich in music.
Lomax, a former University of Texas administrator, and his son Alan made more than 40 primitive recordings of the Gant family, whose vast repertoire ranged from jailhouse ballads and play ditties to cowboy songs and minstrel tunes.
The most prominent of those, in retrospect, was "When First Unto This Country a Stranger I Came," which Joan Baez sang live and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman recorded in 1993. They all learned it from the 1960s folkies the New Lost City Ramblers, who heard it from the Gants.
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