SING LOUD! > Projects > Preserving “Voices Across America” by Pilgrim Productions

Pilgrim Productions’ “Voices Across America” is a homegrown field-recording trove built over years by June Lydic, who travelled, collected submissions, and posted them for free public listening. The original site still exists, but it’s clearly been compromised—many links are broken or hijacked and odd spam (including Cyrillic inserts) appears across the pages.

Enter singer and archivist Kyle Johnston. With June’s blessing, Kyle is recovering, cleaning, and re-presenting the collection on Bandcamp—again as free downloads—so the work remains accessible and non-commercial, exactly as June intended. The holdings span far beyond our corner of shape-note singing: Cajun and country gospel, quartets, Native American choirs, and more. Within that breadth are remarkable shape-note documents: the 150th Chattahoochee Convention (2002), a 1999 Mississippi Cooper Book convention, J.L. White-book singings, Harmonia Sacra and Old Harp recordings, Christian Harmony at Brasstown, and state conventions from Georgia to Minnesota to New Mexico.

Voices Across America on Bandcamp

Index of Shape Note Recordings

Kyle Johnson introduces the project:

Several years ago, while scouring the internet for recordings of Sacred Harp and shape-note music, I stumbled across a clearly homemade, HTML website titled Pilgrim Productions Presents: Voices Across America. The subtitle on the site’s homepage said “Singers and singing groups from across the country present Christian Music for your listening enjoyment.” Exploring the site, I found several shape-note recordings, amongst many other recordings, mostly of a gospel bent. 

A few years later, I went searching for the site again, because for some reason or another, I had lost the recordings I had originally found on that site. When I was successful in relocating the site, I notice some strange things. Some of the links to the music did not work, and there were random phrases dotted around the site written in the cyrillic alphabet, that linked to similar looking pages, but were definitely not the content that the site was originally created for. Fortunately, I was able to locate a contact email for the site, and sent them an email asking about the status of the music and the possibility that their site had been compromised.

I received a reply from a lady named June, who was the person responsible for collecting the recordings. She mentioned that she had been unable to keep up with the site due to her advanced age (at last contact, she stated she was 84 years old.) She then mentioned that she had to look up the owner of the site, and the result was the “Russian Federation.” It was clear that June no longer had control of her site, and learning this, I offered to help preserve the recordings that had originally appeared on her site. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure how I would accomplish this, but my first goal was to make sure the recordings still existed and could be preserved. After some back and forth, I received these two replies hours apart on the same day:

“Thank you so much for your offer. I have the contents of the website stored in the cloud and can give you a link. It would warm my heart to know that the music will be preserved and available for folks to enjoy.

Right now I am with my husband who is at a nursing home. I only have my tablet with me. Later this afternoon, when I get home, I will get on my computer and send you the link.

Thank you.”

and,

“Dear Kyle,

I am so very grateful that God sent you my way. But before I hand over the site to you, I need to be sure that you understand that as I traveled around the country recording singers and groups, and also in cases where recordings were sent to me, I assured the contributors that the site would never be converted into a commercial enterprise, that no one would ever have to pay to hear the music and pilgrim productions would never sell music or merchandise. I also made it clear that listeners would be free to download and make their own copies.”

Once I had copies of the materials from the website, including recordings, pictures, and other supplemental materials, I set about trying to find how to preserve and present these recordings in a way that would honor the original website. Upon digging into the files, I discovered that, in order to preserve these recordings, A LOT of cleanup was necessary. This included reducing duplicates, deleting unnecessary html files, and making sure all the recordings were labeled properly.

After some consideration, I decided on using Bandcamp as the site where these recordings could be presented. I chose Bandcamp because there is no limit to how many recordings/albums I can upload, and I can also set the recordings to be free downloads, in accordance with June’s wishes. So,  I set up a brand new profile and page for Pilgrim Productions, and started uploading recordings.

As of this writing, 48 albums have been processed and uploaded, with their respective artwork, and links to the original artists, if they are still active (many of them aren’t.) There are still plenty of recordings left to go, and I just got started on the shape-note recordings!

Once finished, the entire collection will consist of recordings from 33 states, Canada, Bolivia, several Native American tribes (including the Choctaw, Cherokee, Muskogee, and Potawatomi,) and at least 25 separate shape-note recordings including singings from The Sacred Harp, The Harp of Ages, and The New Harp of Columbia. You can find the Voices Across America collection at https://pilgrimproductions.bandcamp.com/

The following list is a work in progress. We will highlight the shape-note recordings as they appear in the new archive.

The Process

Due to the state of the raw files I was given, a lot of work was needed to prepare these recordings for presentation.

The original organization of the files seemed fine at first glance. They were organized by geographic location (state or country) with the exception of two groups – Native American and Sacred Harp, and even then, some of the Native American groups, like the Choctaw and Cherokee were grouped separately from the Native American files. Within these files were the individual albums, simply named after the place they were recording (roopville, winfield, etc.) I decided to streamline this naming system. First, each geographic region was renamed as a series in the style of “Voices of…” and within that series were the individual albums. For example, “Voices of Carrollton, GA” appears in the “Voices of Georgia” series. As I finished processing each individual album, they were also renamed to “Voices of…” to reflect their presentation on the original site.

To present the albums and extra files found within, some more work had to be done. All of the audio files were in MP3 format, and had no information attached to them besides a track number. The first step in this process was to convert each MP3 into a lossless format, to prevent quality loss when uploading to the internet. In this case, all the audio files were converted into FLAC format using VLC media player’s conversion feature. This process did present the converted files as “clean” files, with no metadata attached to them. But since there was very little attached to the original files, this did not matter too much. The first step to preserving and presenting these files was to add metadata to the files, which can get tedious.

The first step in this process was to decide on an album name. In most cases, the album is called what originally was titled on the original site: “Voices of…”the only thing I added here was the state (or country) abbreviation after each place name. There were only a few that did not originally follow this pattern. For example, “Voices of Carrollton, GA” was originally named “Voices of the Chattahoochee” named after the Chattahoochee Sacred Harp Convention. However, this original name did not follow the naming scheme that the original recorder had set forth, and because there are several places that share the name “Chattahoochee,” I thought it best to stick with the geographic name of the recording, which was Carrollton, GA, which ironically, is not located within the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, and at the closest, it is 19 miles away from the Chattahoochee River.

The next step was to add album artists. In most cases this was pretty straightforward, as many of the albums were made by performing groups. Where this became a challenge was with the Sacred Harp recordings, as these are not typically done by performing groups, and instead are gatherings of many people from all over. For clarity, I decided to use the name of the Sacred Harp events as the “artists” for their recordings. So the artist of “Voices of Winfield, AL” was the 2002 Joseph Jackson Beasley Memorial Singing, which includes all the people present the day of that event.

The most tedious step of this process was naming the tracks. Within each album was an HTML file that opens the original page for the album. In most cases, the tracks were chronological and matched up with the track order on the original site. In other cases, the order of the tracks was different. In these cases, I had to listen to each track to make sure it was the track that was listed on the site, and name it accordingly. To add to the tedium, on the albums that featured songs or tunes from tunebooks or hymnals, such as the Sacred Harp and Choctaw recordings, the tune or hymn number was not included in the original site’s track listing. From an archival standpoint, this was a huge oversight, especially if people wanted to find the source of a tune. So I painstakingly used my own copies of books, online resources, hymnal apps, to track down the reference numbers for each tune. In the case of the Choctaw Hymnal, which only has text, I tried to name the hymns appropriately from the Choctaw language, as well as present the name of the tune being used in each recording, to moderate success.

Once all of this was done, and after resizing the photo used for the original album “cover” I was able to upload each album and its respective tracks to Bandcamp, along with any digital ephemera that happened to be included in the original files.

This process not only was necessary to make the files presentable, but make them a little more accessible and easy to navigate. Once the project is finished and all the files have been processed, I plan to upload the raw files, in their new organization, so that future researchers, hobbyists, and whoever else may find them easy to work with.