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Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards (1938)afc9999005-9637

The lakes of Colfaine

Photograph: The lakes of Colfaine, 1938-08.

Lomax 1938 Beaver Island recording/card: The lakes of Colfaine. LOC item https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.9637/.

Visual descriptionwritten by a machine · unchecked

A grayscale photograph shows a typed catalogue card with a heading, several attribution lines, and a short lyric excerpt. A handwritten note appears near the bottom, partly beside a solid black circular mark.

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, Alec (Singer)

1,485 × 907 px · JPEG 2000 · 65 KB

Subjects and keywords

Text in the image

Transcribed from the object itself.

2296
A1
The lakes of Colfaine
Sung by J. W. Green.
St. James, Beaver Island, Mich.,
Alan Lomax, Aug., 1938.

f.l. As I went walking one morning
in May.

Fragment

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 identifies this as a 1938-08 item in the Alan Lomax Beaver Island field recordings and catalogue cards collection, held by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. It attributes the recording to Alan Lomax as recordist and Alec Green as singer; the card itself names J. W. Green.

Rights and credit

Public domain (Library of Congress; no known restrictions)

Credit this to Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, Alec (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, Alec (Singer)
Date
1938-08
Original
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/afc/afc9999005-9637/0695.jp2
Copy taken
2026-07-31
Title from
an article in this archive

The file

Renditions held
RenditionFormatExtentSizeSHA-256
MasterJPEG 20001,485 × 907 px65 KBee657254ad50…

Checksums are the values recorded when each copy was taken.

Download

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

Cite this

Lomax, Alan (1915-2002) (Recordist); Green, Alec (Singer). “The lakes of Colfaine”. 1938-08. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. Beaver Island Archive, https://beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/afc9999005-9637/. 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.