While most of us spent our childhood dancing to Britney Spears and the Spice Girls, Abby Nover, a senior sound design major, learned to tie her shoes listening to her father’s favorite blues records. Abby grew up on the blues. In high school, she spent Saturday nights listening to the American Routes radio program with her dad, when one night, the station played a track that was unlike anything Abby had ever heard before. The song was from Muddy Waters: The Plantation Recordings, recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941.” It was unlike anything I had ever heard,” says Abby. “Raw, unpretentious, and soulful. It was as if I could hear Muddy Waters and his whole environment in the recording. That stuck with me.”
The more Abby listened to Lomax, to the 1970 field recording, the more she realized on thing: it was time for an update. The way music is recorded has come a long way in the past forty years. Anyone with a computer or a smart phone can create and share music. Why shouldn’t Abby?
And so she started Natural Rhythm, a tour, in homage to Alan Lomax, following the footsteps of the Great Migration: from New Orleans, to Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago. On the road, the goal is to record and capture the American folk and roots music alive and thriving in 2014, and ultimately show how folk music has changed since the 1930s and 40s. It takes more than passion to pull of this project. It takes months of studying—discovering musical traditions and heritage centers for each reason, various equipment needed for any situation— as well as the help of a CMU undergraduate research fellowship, non-profit sponsorship and an IndieGoGo campaign, and of course, a 2004 Toyota Carola sans air conditioning.
For Abby and the project’s photographer, Tegan Ritz McDuffie, a CMU graduate from the School of Drama, it takes two days to drive from NYC to New Orleans. But when they arrive in each new city, the same routine ensues. They find a coffee shop. They call different locations—senior centers, youth centers. They explore, and in cities routed in blues, there is always something to see: street performers, record stores, park performers, instrument shops—anywhere there may be a tune. Some days are more exhausting than others. In Memphis, the streets are alive. In the Mississippi Delta, the only thing alive is the music. The team moves from city to city, meeting artists in all shapes and sizes. There is a 92-year-old fiddler, a 13-year-old Cajun accordion player. They book recording sessions. They make art.
In total, Natural Rhythm gathered 50 tracks from 13 recording sessions, but despite this accomplishment, Abby realizes her summer has only scratched the surface of a larger project that must be completed. There is a connection between social issues and music—“An imbalance that needs attention,” says Abby on the poverty striking these areas of artistry. In spite of talent, all types of people with passion and spark struggle to make it in this economically driven world. They are confined by poverty: “I feel committed not only to preserving American folk music, but also ensuring that the people that hold these traditions are able to make a living, whether they are professional musicians or not,” says Abby.
Abby is working on finding ways to continue this project, but for right now, the next steps are to launch the recordings online. Check them out this December at naturalrhythmproject.com.