Aunt Jenny Wilson

This collection, released by the Field Recorders' Collective in 2007, serves as a vital archival document of the Appalachian banjo tradition. It captures the performances of Aunt Jenny Wilson, a renowned musician from Logan County, West Virginia, whose influence spanned several generations of mountain music. The recordings were largely sourced from the field tapes of folklorist Alan Lomax, who documented Wilson's intricate clawhammer style and vast repertoire of traditional ballads during his trips through the region in the mid-20th century.

The Field Recorders' Collective was established to preserve and distribute these historically significant field recordings, often sourced from the archives of the Library of Congress and other private collections. By curating Wilson’s music for this release, the collective aimed to provide a raw, intimate portrait of a musician who learned her craft in the isolated coal camps of the early 1900s. The release is valued by ethnomusicologists and folk enthusiasts for its unfiltered preservation of her vocal phrasing and idiosyncratic banjo technique, representing a period of musical heritage that was rapidly changing at the time of the original recordings.