Cover art for Art Rosenbaum's "Art of Field Recording 1" (courtesy Dust to Digital painting by Art Rosenbaum)
82-year old Mary Lomax grew up on a farm in Habersham County. As a little girl she spent her days working in the fields, feeding the pigs, and milking the cows. As the sun would set, she and her nine brothers and sisters would come home.
"Whenever we'd get all that done we'd go back to the house and Mama would have supper on the table. We'd eat and then we'd go in there. If it was the winter time we'd go down in there and sit down by the fireplace, and my Dad would sing."
Mary still sings some of the 300 songs she learned in her childhood, including the English ballad, "Drowsy Sleeper." It's a folk song with 200-year old roots in England.
"Wake up, Wake up you drowsy sleeper. Wake up, Wake up it is almost day. How can you bear...."
When folk music historian Art Rosenbaum discovered Mary she was still living in the Habersham County foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He's now recorded several of her songs for his two boxed sets of folk music, including the Grammy Award winning, "Art of Field Recording 1."
"Her repertoire of these old songs, some of which go back to the British Isles, and they're several hundred years old, is a very ample and extraordinary repertoire. A lot of these songs have been forgotten."
But Mary and her sister Bonnie Loggins have not forgotten the songs of their childhood. From memory Bonnie, who's nearly 90 can still sing all five verses of the song, "True Blue Bill."
"Once when I was shipwrecked on the islands in the sea, by cannibals I was captured and tied up to a tree. They danced and beat their Tom-Toms and they got rather rough. They said that I wouldn't make good steak because I looked too tough. I'm a truthful fellow, folks call be True Blue Bill. I've never told a falsehood and you can bet I never will."
Bonnie keeps the songs, passed down in the oral tradition in her head. But, her sister Mary has them hand-written on large sheets of white paper. This way they will not be forgotten.
"My brother wrote down a lot of them that he sang and I did some of them. So, that's where all my, most of the songs we got from him, my Dad."
After Mary's recordings were released in Rosenbaum's collection one reviewer called her one of the most important find's anyone's made in decades.
Music that she once only shared with her family is now reaching a wider audience, like the crowd that came to see her perform at Wesleyan College in Macon. Rosenbaum says this is typical of the many folk performers he's documented.
"Sometimes the music went public, you know you'd get a gig to play for a dance or maybe a recording company would come around and say, will you make some records? But the real life blood, the heart and soul of the music is the church or social life of the community or family."
And Mary and Bonnie have passed down the music to their family. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can sing many of the songs that have been sung for hundreds of years.
Mary says the music she learned at the feet of her father will stay with her always.
"Whenever I sing them, I just can picture what they're like. I just love to sing 'em."
And her sister Bonnie agrees.
