Washington, D.C.
The Lomaxes arrived at Galax, Virginia late in the afternoon of June 13 and at once communicated with Dr. W. P. Davis, the director or chairman of the Bogtrotters Band who they found ill at his country home. Realizing that they could make no recordings on this trip, they started next morning on the last day's travel of their 1939 recording trip and reached Washington in the late afternoon of June 14. Their speedometer showed 6502 miles since they started out in Texas on March 31.
From February 8,1939 until June i4,1939, I made a ballad-collecting criss-cross trip of 6502 miles through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia on into Washington, D.C. During this three and a half months, with the assistance of Mrs. Ruby Terrill Lomax, I recorded on one hundred and forty-two discs the music of more than six hundred folk tunes. Some were new to us, though in many instances we re-recorded folk songs sung in a different manner, or slightly different musically from already known material. In visiting the homes, schools and churches of the Southern folk and recording their singing in their own locale, we carried out the theory of the Folk Song Archive of the Library of Congress, namely, that folk singers render their music more naturally in the easy sociability of their own people. 1939 Southern Recording Trip Report