It's always sorta strange to read about the South, or Virginia, or even Norfolk in a British magazine. But more often than you would think, I learn things about my own home from folks on the other side of the Atlantic. British music magazines cover American music better than American magazines in many cases. So I wasn't entirely surprised to read a piece in the April issue of Mojo that mentioned a 1959 trip to Norfolk by the famous folk song collector Alan Lomax. The story is a recollection by Shirley Collins, a British singer and banjo player, who accompanied Lomax on a song-catching expedition through Dixie. Their first stop? Norfolk.
"We got to Norfolk, the big seaport, and went into the black part of town and Alan left me in the car for an hour after dark while he went to a beer joint looking for shanty singer. I was just this little white face inside a big Buick outside a beer joint," Collins wrote. I'm guessing Lomax and Collins were somewhere on or near Church Street.
Collins doesn't say what else happened in Norfolk. They couple soon headed to the western part of the state to record Texas Gladden as well as Hobart and Preston Smith.
"Finding music was easy in Virginia," she wrote. "Wherever we went people would recommend us local musicians -- neighbors, tobacco farmers and others."
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