Lomax 1938 Beaver Island recording/card: Brennan on the moor. LOC item https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.9588/.
Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked
A rectangular paper card fills the frame, showing a typed song heading and lyrics with handwritten additions below. A dark circular mark obscures part of the lower writing, and the card has a small code in its upper-left corner.
A model wrote this. It was shown the image and the catalogue record together, and asked to keep them apart — what it saw is here, what the record told it is under "taken from the record" below. It is still wrong often enough to matter, about who is pictured, where, when, and what is happening. Read it as a way to find the image, never as evidence about it. If you can correct it, please do: write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com, or see how corrections work. Someone who recognises a face or a shoreline knows more than the model did.
Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, J. W. (Singer)
1,485 × 907 px · JPEG 2000 · 65 KB
Subjects and keywords
Text in the image
Transcribed from the object itself.
2280 B2 Brennan on the moor Sung by J. W. Green. St. James, Beaver Island, Mich. Alan Lomax, Aug., 1939. S f.l. It's of a noted highwayman, the truth to you I'll tell. refr. Same as title. refr. Second line. And bold brave stood Brennan on the im- daunted moor.
Taken from the record
Not observed in the image — supplied by the archive's own catalogue, and repeated here so the two stay distinguishable.
The catalogue record identifies this as a photograph in the Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards collection, dates it August 1938, and credits Alan Lomax as recordist and J. W. Green as singer. The card itself visibly gives the year as 1939, which conflicts with the catalogue date.
Could not make out
Stated rather than guessed at.
The handwritten word split across the final two lines is partly difficult to read, and a dark circular mark obscures some of the lower text.
Rights and credit
Public domain (Library of Congress; no known restrictions)
Credit this to Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, J. W. (Singer) when you use it.
Material goes off the web without anyone deciding that it should: a host lapses, a gallery is retired, a link stops resolving. Holding a copy — with its provenance, its checksum and its holder's terms recorded beside it — is much of why this archive exists. If you are looking for something whose original has since gone, write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com and a full-size copy of what is held here will be sent to you.
Recorded verbatim from the provenance sidecar taken at retrieval — this archive does not restate a holder's terms in its own words, does not add a restriction the holder did not state, and does not abridge one.
Provenance
- Held by
- Library of Congress, American Folklife Center
- Collection
- Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)
- Named on the record
- Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, J. W. (Singer)
- Date
- 1938-08
- Original
- https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/afc/afc9999005-9588/0646.jp2
- Copy taken
- 2026-07-31
- Title from
- an article in this archive
The file
| Rendition | Format | Extent | Size | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Master | JPEG 2000 | 1,485 × 907 px | 65 KB | 824b06fbd0d3… |
Checksums are the values recorded when each copy was taken.
Download
- Web-sized image900 × 550 · 27 KB · WebP
- The full-resolution original, from Library of Congress, American Folklife Center1,485 × 907 · 65 KB · JPEG 2000
The archive holds its own copy of that file and will supply it on request; it is not re-served here, because the holder serves it better and a second copy is a second thing to go stale.
In this archive
- Written aboutBrennan on the moor
- DepictsBrennan on the Moor; Bonny Black Bess
Cite this
Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, J. W. (Singer). “Brennan on the moor”. 1938-08. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/afc9999005-9588/. copy retrieved 2026-07-31.
Built only from what the archive recorded: the names on the record, the title as recorded, the date if one was recorded, this page, and the date the copy was taken. Nothing is filled in to satisfy a citation style.