(thing) by tooblasted Mon Jun 17 2002 at 20:33:59
"Here ya go, guys. Here's the equipment that Moby's last CD was recorded on."


-- Don Fleming's recollection of an interview he did with the BBC, as he gestured toward Alan Lomax's ancient reel-to-reel recorder.


Though Moby has a nice-guy reputation and a fervent fan base, often overlooked is the fact most of the material on his breakthrough album "Play" was lifted directly from field recordings made by Alan Lomax.

Moby's hit "Natural Blues" sampled extensively from "Trouble So Hard," an obscure 1930s recording sung by the late Vera Hall.

Lomax, now 87 and retired in Florida, collected the Vera Hall material during one of his many trips through the American South, where he recorded such figures as Muddy Waters. Hall's work is merely a small fragment of the thousands of hours of tape in the Lomax Archives' vaults.

Moby sampled the songs legally, having paid a nominal licensing fee for their use, but Hall's heirs, as of 2002, have only seen a fraction of the royalties Moby has.

Moby seems untroubled by such thoughts.

"I wish I had stories about me getting them myself," Moby told a CNN reporter in 2000, "hanging out in prisons and farms in Georgia, Atlanta or Alabama, or whatever. But no, I just went around the corner to my old record store and bought the reissues."

Sources:

www.cnn.com
www.alan-lomax.com
www.ubl.com
Personal reportage, conversations with Don Fleming, October 2001-May 2002.
I like it! 1 C!