A rare glimpse at music’s historic roots is on offer tomorrow night, as GUY KIDDEY reports

IN 1951, when the news was still being read in black tie, the BBC commissioned the great folklorist Alan Lomax, who collected music from all over the world, to make recordings of traditional British music.

The American, who would be hailed as the world’s first musicologist, had already gained a reputation for his meticulous fieldwork back home across the Atlantic.

Apart from the five documentaries he made in the 1980s for PBS, the American national broadcaster, much of the 400 hours of footage he collected from America alone is still little known.

He conducted now-legendary interviews with old-time luminaries like Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Pete Seeger.

These trailblazers defined the folk and blues which would morph into the music of the 60s, and every popular music craze since.

Without them, there would have been no Bob Dylan and no Beatles - and they were the very musicians who inspired Nathan Salsburg of the Alan Lomax Archive in Louisville, Kentucky.

He grew up listening to American folk, much of which has its roots in the Gaelic music imported with centuries of immigrants, and has the glorious job of re-mastering and curating all of Lomax’s American recordings.

Tomorrow at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Stepney Bank, Byker, he will join musician Alasdair Roberts, a standard-bearer of the British folk revival, in presenting some of the most seminal clips from the archive.

Marking the 60th anniversary of Lomax’s great British project, this is the first time much of the music included in a presentation called American Patchwork will have been heard in the UK.

A short tour will also take Lomax’s digitally remastered work to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

To add to this commemorative year, Nathan and Alasdair have also collaborated to record Whaur the Pig Gaed on the Spree, an album of song in the style of the British music recorded by Lomax in those days of flannel trousers and straight-cut skirts.

Nathan says the political significance of Lomax’s work resonates strongly with today’s public.

“Alan Lomax’s mission was to get people looking for the culture in their own back yards.

“He came up with the concept of cultural equity – a strongly counter-commercial argument about everybody having the right to know their local culture.

“People are starting to revert back to small-scale perspectives.

“The whole organic movement, attitudes towards the local community – they’re exactly what Lomax was about,” he says.

While contemporary folk music has gained in popularity over the past few years, the old songs are still around. Interest in them and the people who wrote them is growing.

“The main aim of this American Patchwork tour is to inform – to make people realise that all this song exists,” Nathan says.

This is exactly what Lomax, who died in 2002 at the age of 87, would have wanted.

American Patchwork is at the Star and Shadow Cinema at 7.30pm tomorrow.

For more information contact info@starandshadow.org.uk or 0191 261 0066.