From 1978 to 1983, Alan Lomax and several crews (first film, then video) travelled through the American South and Southwest documenting its traditional music:
- New Orleans; brass bands, second-liners, and Mardi Gras Indians;
- Kentucky; miners, moonshiners, and Primitive Baptists;
- North Carolina; flat-footers, string bands, and Piedmont blues;
- Louisiana; Cajun cowboys, fiddlers, and zydeco stompers in French-speaking;
- Mississippi; fife-and-drum ensembles, gospel quartets, former railroad track-liners, levee-camp muleskinners, and players on the pre-war blues circuit;
- Arizona; the vernacular music and material culture among Mexican American communities and the Tohono O'odham, Yacqui, and Mountain Apache.

This footage ultimately totaled some 350 hours and was edited into Lomax's "American Patchwork" series, which aired on American public television in 1991.

After John Avery Lomax (see page) in the 1930s and his son Alan (see page), many people set out to map out the blues tradition and spread it to others. A number of them have already been covered on the "Nicknames and stage names" pages: Frederic Ramsey (see page), Harry Oster (see page), Gene Rosenthal (see page), Studs Terkel (see page), and
Chris Stratwichz, Christian Garrison, Shirley Collins, Thomas Bird "Fang" Hoskins, Dick Spottswood (see page),

From the 1950’s through the 80’s there were folklorists, researchers and dedicated fans such as David Evans, George Mitchell, Sam Charters, Mack McCormick, Bruce Jackson, Peter B. Lowry, Tary Owens, Art Rosenbaum, Pete Welding, Bengt Olsson, Gianni Marcucci, Glenn Hinson, Tim Duffy, Axel Küstner and Kip Lornell who actively sought out and recorded rural blues (part 4 and 5).

According to Jeff Harris (who presented the Big Road Blues Show on Jazz90.1), the last great large-scale recording trips took place in 1980 by Axel Küstner and his friend Ziggy Chrismann. The trip was to survey southern blues and gospel. It was the end of the era in way, and while there was fieldwork done after, there were no more large scale surveys, and in his opinion a precipitous drop in quality (part 5).

The Mojo Triangle
James L. Dickerson coined the name "The Mojo Triangle" to indicate the birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock 'n' Roll. The Mojo Triangle, a geographical and cultural area located within a triangular connection between New Orleans, Nashville and Memphis. Most researchers were interested in this triangle and undertook many trips to track down ancient traditions.
A fiddle tune named "Natchez Under the Hill," which originated in the joints along the docks in Natchez, was one of the first original songs ever published in America, according to Dickerson. Published in 1834, it was re-titled "Old Zip Coon," only to later morph into "Turkey in the Straw." With that song began a tradition that inspired the creation of a musical dynasty.

Natchez remained a musical cauldron throughout the 1800s, blending traditional folk music from Europe with the exotic rhythms and harmonies of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, and the unique phrasing vocalized by slaves from Africa. But it was not until the late 1920s, when Jimmie Rodgers began recording what would later be recognized as America's first country music that the first blend of European/Native American/African music took hold.
Ten years later, Robert Johnson took the music recorded by Rodgers and moved it a step further by recording what we today call blues music. Both Rodgers and Johnson owe an enormous debt to the Choctaw. "Both use 6/4, 5/4, and 4/4 time signatures, and both use short 6/4 introductions that quickly change to 5/4 or 4/4 after one or two bars. For example Johnson's 'Little Queen of Spades' has a one bar introduction in 6/4 that changes to 4/4, an identical time signature to the Choctaw's 'Wedding Dance,' which also goes 6/4 to 4/4."

Musicians in New Orleans incorporated the music of Natchez and added Caribbean influences to produce jazz, a free-flowing instrumental interpretation of the same influences that birthed blues and country. In the mid-1950s, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black took the work of Rodgers and Johnson and gave shape to rock and roll, creating an unbroken circle of creativity that continues to this day.

The blues styles of the Mississippi Delta, Texas, and the Piedmont region of the Southeastern Coast, or from cities like Memphis and Chicago differ from each other.
- Delta blues; un-amplified guitar, rhythmic and spoken vocals, drones, moans, bottleneck slide techniques, and a generally “heavy” texture;
- Memphis blues; smooth and arranged, brass and/or saxophones prominent, soulful vocals, and a lighter feel;
- Chicago blues; simple structure, electricity, amplification, bass-drums-guitar-harmonica instrumentation, “raw” sounding.

In the first video David recommends a documentary by William Ferris, one of 16mm independent filmmakers. The 1975 film shows a local bar in the Mississippi Delta, where people sing, dance, and tell each other stories.
In the second video, David talks about how the film recording of B.B. King's performance at Sing Sing Prison in 1972 came about (contains footage of the concert).