Alan Lomax Beaver Island catalog-card photographs, 1933–1938

Summary

The same Library of Congress collection that holds the 71 Beaver Island sound recording records also contains 108 digitized photographs of catalog cards. They belong to the Traditional Music and Spoken Word Card Catalog and describe songs, performers, dates, and collection identifiers; they are not 108 additional audio recordings. Each card now has its own item-level Photograph article, with a depicts link when its AFS call-number key matches a held sound-recording article. 106 cards join to held audio records; two AFS 02270 cards do not, and remain explicitly unlinked.

The “Willie-o” catalog card, sung by J. W. Green — a representative card from the collection

Scope and dates

The cards are associated with Saint James and the Beaver Island field-recording corpus. Of the 108 held card photographs, 107 carry an August 1938 date, matching the session documented by the recording records. One card in the held directory carries a 1933 metadata date. The broad 1933–1938 span is retained as an inventory fact, with the outlier called out rather than silently normalizing it to 1938.

Performers named on the cards

The cards’ own contributor fields name performers using card-specific spellings that do not always match the sound-recording catalog’s forms. “Green, J. W.” is credited on 66 of the 108 cards — the same singer the recording catalog spells “Green, John W., 1871–1963” — making him the dominant performer on the cards as he is on the recordings themselves. Patrick Bonner is credited on 8 cards and Dominick Gallagher on 6, both spelled with a terminal “-k” on the cards where the recording catalog drops it for Dominic. Andrew E. Gallagher appears on 4 cards. Three cards credit a performer given only as “Green, Alec,” a name that does not appear among the sound-recording credits held here and is not otherwise identified. Eight cards carry no identified performer. The remaining cards each credit one of Edward McCauley, Barney McCarthy, Joseph Ricksgers, Daniel Bonner, Helen Pischner, Mike J. O’Donnell, Emerald Gallagher, or Patrick McDonough — several of these names appear on the cards in variant spellings (“McCanley,” “Riskers,” “McDounough”) that this article preserves as catalog forms rather than silently correcting to the recording catalog’s spelling.

Collection context

Each card’s own metadata carries a “statement of responsibility” line — for example, the representative Willie-O card reads “Sung by J. W. Green” — and identifies the card as belonging to three nested Library of Congress holdings: the Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings (1,270 items catalogued collection-wide), the Traditional Music and Spoken Word Card Catalog (34,217 items), and the American Folklife Center’s holdings generally (179,136 items). The 108 Beaver Island cards held here are accordingly a small, geographically specific slice of a much larger card catalog documenting Lomax’s Michigan and Wisconsin fieldwork, not a freestanding photograph set.

Added 31 July 2026 · revised 4 August 2026. Recent changes