I'd Like a Sample Pt. 2

From Field Holler to Electro-Blues

1. Enter ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax from Austin, Texas. Alan was a particularly focused human being, and his goal, indeed his mission in life, was to document the voices of the unheard.

   "For a long time I was a media bug because I saw that the job of a folklorist was to make a bridge between people who had no voice and the big world of communication.”

   -Alan Lomax, ethnomusicologist, Library of Congress

   On Sept. 21, 1959, Lomax found himself in Como, Mississippi recording a field holler known as Green Sally, Up by three women, Mattie Garder, Mary Gardner, and Jesse Lee Pratcher. The melody arrived from the fields of the Deep South, but this version was a popular children’s dance.

2. The trio’s version includes an interesting lyric that may be something of a code (I do love me a good coded message).

   Old Miss Lucy's dead and gone
   Left me here to weep and moan

   If you hate it, fold your arms

   If you love it, clap your hands

   The story might be apocryphal, but some sources seem to believe this was a coded way for slaves to express appreciation or contempt for a slave owner’s wife, in this case, the recently departed Miss Lucy. I can accept this.

3. Enter an NYC-born DJ with a crate-digging obsession calling himself Moby. Apparently, he discovered Alan Lomax and the Anthology of American Folk Music released by Smithsonian Folkways, a massive compilation of 84 recordings over three full-length records. Moby went into his lab armed with field chants and folk songs and emerged in 1999 with his dynamic apex Play. The fourth track, Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad, has a B side made famous by the intro to the so-bad-it’s-good Nic Cage flick Gone in 60 Seconds. I’m talking about Flower, an electro-blues thing that samples heavily from Green Sally, Up. On the strength of that intro and Moby’s choice to release Play: The B Sides, the song erupted into popular conscience. Lomax found what he was looking for. Moby too. The jury is still out about making money from Black music though. I would just like to pay homage.