The latest of Rounder’s releases from the voluminous archives of folklorist Alan Lomax focuses on festival and field recordings made in the summer of 1952 on Mallorca, today an autonomous region of Spain. Inspired by the exuberant songs and traditional dance melodies he captured at the Palma Folklore Festival, Lomax stayed over for nearly two weeks, roaming the nearby countryside and taping a fascinating assortment of rural threshing, reaping, milking, fig and olive picking songs; some raucous ‘zambomba’ or friction drumming; shepherding tunes; peasant lullabies and hymns, and some mildly erotic selections alongside numerous efforts lamenting the hardships of country life under Franco’s police state.
Vocalists such as Francesca Mas Torres, Antonia Estrades, Sebastia Ordines and the father/ daughter team of Francesca and Maria Capo prove quite entrancing with their painful and rough, yet extraordinarily poignant and utterly timeless deliveries. A dense, scholarly 40-page booklet features notes and translations for each of the 46 tracks (mostly brief and previously unreleased), along with fact-packed commentaries on the tense political context of the time and the various instruments, dance and song styles employed.
