The Global Jukebox offers access to more than 6000 recordings from around the globe that can now be streamed freely online.
“The Global Jukebox is presented as a free, non-commercial, educational place for everybody, students, educators, scholars, scientists, musicians, dancers, linguists, artists and music fans to explore expressive patterns in their cultural-geographic and diasporic settings and alongside other people’s. By inviting familiarity with many kinds of vocalizing, musicking, moving, and talking, we hope to advance cultural equity and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage.”
Search the database with the map or on the ‘tree’, searching by region or cultural group. Clicking on these images will take you though to the website.
Further details on Global Jukebox can be found in this New York times article from April 18th 2017:
“Alan Lomax made it his lifelong mission to archive and share traditional music from around the world. He spent decades in the field, recording heralded artists like Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, as well as far more obscure musicians, from the British Isles to Haiti. He also created systems to classify this music and explore the links between cultures.
“The website, organized by map and by culture, is free to use. The wide-ranging samples were digitized from hard copies at the Library of Congress and include 1978 field recordings from the Kullu culture in Himachal Pradesh, India; harvest songs from 1954 Romania; and a ballad to John Henry from Asheville, N.C., in 1941, recorded by Lomax.”
