Various Artists

SING CHRISTMAS AND THE TURN OF THE YEAR

(Rounder)

Folklorist and music historian Alan Lomax's massive and amazing audio tour of the world has made for an enduring project at Rounder Records, where dozens of discs breaking down his discoveries have been issued in the last two years. This CD is an hour-long radio broadcast Lomax supervised on Christmas Day in 1957 for the BBC, where, as he says in his exuberant between-song script, "carols blaze around the seven sides of Britain this morning like the brandy round a Christmas pudding." But carols are just a tiny piece of the proceedings, hardly any of which has previously been released. From the Cheshire Cheese Pub in Derbyshire to Wales and Scotland and the corners of London occupied by expatriate Trinidadians, Lomax and his British counterparts shine a light on masters and amateurs bringing life to holiday music, from the sacred on down. Solemn hymns, gritty workers' songs, and the hootenanny hybrid known as skiffle all make cameos. Given the constant voiceovers and the rapid movement from style to style, this is not a disc to cook or shop by. Instead, it is a historical document, and a good one at that, with several arresting performances and heaps of the primitive, self-taught artistry that Lomax and his fellow travelers valued so highly.

-- Bill Kisliuk