Although most well known for the songs it collected, the Coahoma study also solicited tall tales, jokes, extended ballads and stories, commentary on race relations, oral histories and children’s game songs. The recordings featured here allow an insight into the everyday lives and thoughts of residents of the Delta.
Coahoma Podcast - Episode 4 Why Don't You Live So God Can Use You
While the focal point of religious music is the church service, individuals and groups often religious music outside of the church setting. We explore a wide range of music, including a song by Muddy Waters that provided the title of this episode. We’ll also hear hymns, spirituals and shouts performed at people’s homes and other informal settings.
Coahoma Podcast - Episode 3 Let the Church Roll On
The Delta is world renowned as a home of the blues, but its traditions of religious music are equally majestic and even more widespread. This episode features recordings made largely during church services, featuring both older traditions as well as new forms of music influenced by the gospel movement that took off in the 1930s.
Coahoma Podcast - Episode 2 Before the Blues
The blues is thought to have emerged around 1900, drawing upon pre-existing African American secular styles of music. Here we’ll explore field hollers, work songs, fife and drum bands and string bands. Folklorists including Alan Lomax were particularly interested in documenting musical forms that predated the blues, and often prompted musicians to play the oldest forms of music that they knew.
Coahoma Podcast - Episode 1 The Delta Blues World of Muddy Waters
This episode features Muddy Waters’ first recordings as well as songs by his mentor, Son House, House’s associate Willie Brown, and Waters’ contemporary David “Honeyboy” Edwards. It also features interviews with Waters and Edwards as well as songs about World War II, which the United States joined soon after the Coahoma study began.
Coahoma Podcast - Introduction Welcome to Coahoma
This relatively brief episode explains how this project came to be through a partnership between Delta State and the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), which maintains the Alan Lomax Archive. It also explains the background of the Coahoma and the partnership of the Library of Congress and Fisk University, and addresses the scope of this podcast.