Matthew Ord is a lecturer in music at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of Sound Recording in Post-war British Folk: Ideology, Discourse and Practice (2025), published by Bloomsbury Academic.

This lecture explores the fundamental link between sound recording and 20th-century American musical culture through a series of landmark recordings.

This session analyzes the motivations and methods of major figures in sound recording and folklorism, such as Alan Lomax, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Ralph Peer, whose work has profoundly influenced our understanding of American musical traditions.

It also examines their relationships with the musicians they recorded, as well as their influence on subsequent generations of musicians who drew inspiration from their recordings.

The work of these figures constitutes a complex legacy, producing a vast archive of sounds that might otherwise have been lost to history, while undoubtedly obscuring others that later researchers and musicians have sought to recover.