Son House, Willie Brown, and Friends

The 1941 Library of Congress Field Recordings

Eddie “Son” House with National guitar.

In 1941, Nashville’s Fisk University, acting on a proposal from professor John Wesley Work III, asked the Library of Congress to help fund recordings of Black musicians in the upper northwest corner of Mississippi. Alan Lomax, who’d accompanied his father, John Lomax, on Southern field trips during the 1930s, was …