Picture, if you can, Robert Plant first thing in the morning. He’s just got up. He’s having a bagel. He’s got bed head, but his bed head is better than your bed head. He’s having a coffee, or maybe a herbal tea. Maybe he’s doing a spot of yoga. Lovely silk dressing gown, Robert! Now he’s putting on a record, and this is where your imagination can have a rest because in 2020 he told this writer all about the album he likes to start the day with. It’s a box set documenting the work of Alan Lomax after the American ethnomusicologist was given funding to trek across the Southern states of the US with his field recording equipment and collect folk songs. Accompanied by his then-partner Shirley Collins, their trip came to be known as the Southern Journey.
“I’ve spent a lot of time over in Nashville, in the last ten years I’ve spent time not exactly being the musical tourist that I used to be but more digging in to other aspects of Americana and American culture,” Plant explained. “I’ve learnt more and more and more about music forms that are antiquarian but at the same time, because they’re relatively new to me, they open up my enthusiasm and excitement as I find more and more of these strange songs. It takes me into the condition that I like best of all, and that is to be the hunter, the student, the geek who tries to find song structures and lyrical structures that are coming from another place altogether. This is a compilation that’s not particularly rare, it’s part of the kind of Smithsonian catalogue of American music.”
