The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress

By Joseph B. White

Here’s a mind-expanding way to spend a few free hours in Washington. Go to the Library of Congress, pay homage to the Gutenberg Bible on display not far from the main entrance and visit the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s library on the second floor. Then, go see the real Library.

To get there, take the elevator at the back of the first floor entry hall to the C (cellar) level, and enter the underground tunnels that connect the LOC’s main buildings. Follow the signs for reader registration. Essentially, you are getting a library card for the biggest library in the country.

It’s easy. You show a photo ID, enter some personal data in the computer system, and soon you have a freshly minted photo ID, a bar-coded pass to the collections, good for two years. On the way back to the Jefferson building, stop at the underground cafeteria on the way back for a cup of coffee (not great) and a chunk of red velvet cake (ok, not great, either).

After my coffee break, I took my new all-access pass to the American Folklife Center reading room, back in the Jefferson building room LJ G53. This is the home of the amazing collection of blues and folk music collected by Alan Lomax during a 70-year career.

The Folklife Center librarians are friendly, and apparently quite used to dealing with blues geeks who wander in babbling about Lomax. That’s what I did, and before I knew it, I had been presented with a copy of Lomax’s book about his travels recording blues musicians in the Jim Crow era South, “The Land Where the Blues Began.” Also pressed into my hands was a computer printout listing some of Lomax’s recordings from a 1942 trip through the Mississippi Delta during which he recorded, among others, Son House and a young singer listed as “MacKinley Morganfield.” That’s Muddy Waters to you.

I asked to listen to some Son House and recordings of a gospel group called the Friendly Five Harmony Singers. (Muddy Waters seemed too obvious.)

One of the librarians rolled over to my chair an ancient, reel-to-reel tape recorder, roughly the size of a suitcase and mounted to a rolling stand. It had a sticker identifying it as the property of National Public Radio – I assume NPR donated this antique to the Library for the purpose of allowing people like me to listen to these classic Lomax field recording in a vintage way. Because that’s what you get – a scuffed cardboard box that contains a reel-to-reel tape. Not a CD. Not a cassette.

The librarian threaded the tape, handed me the headphones and Presto! My head’s in a hotel room in Mississippi in July 1942 where Son House is explaining to Lomax how he tunes his guitar. (I think he called it, “A down low.” I couldn’t follow it without guitar in hand, but if I had one, I would have had all the notes, played two or three times by Mr. House.)

I listened to two reels worth of Son House – “American Defense Blues,” about the virtues of the World War II military buildup, and more familiar songs like the “Death Letter Blues,” listed in the catalogue as “Walking Blues.” I listened to The Friendly Five Harmony Singers sing old, old school gospel. A final tape had a long monologue identified only as “Talking to colored fellow about Jefferson Davis.” But it was time to go.

This was just one sliver of the Lomax collection, which is in turn just a fraction of all the folk music collected in this section of the library.

The one downside: Even with the fancy library card, you can’t take the tapes out of the building. Of course, even if you did, who’s got a reel-to-reel?