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Baby Tate with Peg Leg Sam - Bad Gasoline
Peter B. "Pete" Lowry (born April 1, 1941) is an American folklorist, writer, record producer, ethnomusicologist, historian, photographer, forensic musicologist, and teacher who deals with aspects of popular music, mainly African American. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, he has specialized in blues and jazz with a primary focus on the Piedmont blues of the south-eastern United States.
Contents
- Baby Tate with Peg Leg Sam Bad Gasoline
- Baby Tate You Can Always Tell
- Ethnomusicological field research
- Trix Records
- Alan Lomax and Library of Congress
- Writings on music
- Education and current endeavors
- Select publications
- References
Baby Tate - You Can Always Tell
Ethnomusicological field research
Lowry traveled through the South Eastern United States for over a decade in the 1970s and 80's doing field recording and other research in the Piedmont region of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, including interviewing, photographing, and recording blues and gospel musicians between 1970 and 1980, initially working in collaboration with British folklorist Bruce Bastin. His field research also took him occasionally to the Midwestern US, where he recorded local Michigan pianists for the album Detroit After Hours - Vol. 1 and on to Chicago to record the blues albums Goin' Back Home (Homesick James) and I've Been Around (David "Honeyboy" Edwards).
Trix Records
In the early 1970s Lowry founded Trix Records, which proceeded to issue six 45s, and then 17 full-length LPs, from his hundreds of hours of field recordings. Trix artists included the stepson of Blues legend Robert Johnson, Robert Jr. Lockwood; Detroit and Macon, GA's Eddie Kirkland; Chicago's David "Honeyboy" Edwards; and New York-based Tarheel Slim. The then 92-year-old Edwards was the oldest musician to perform in Washington at the official celebration of the first inauguration of his country's first African American president, Edwards' neighbor, Barack Obama and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Trix Records remained active for two decades before the issued LP masters and company name were sold to Joe Fields of Muse Records, in New York. It was subsequently sold on to Joel Dorn and 32 Jazz/Blues, also in NYC, before ending with JVC's Savoy Jazz imprint. Lowry also produced albums for Atlantic Records (at the urging of Atlantic's founder Ahmet Ertegun), Muse Records, Savoy Records, Columbia Records, Biograph Records, Flyright Records, and other companies. He began writing about blues music for Blues Unlimited in the UK in 1964 when, at the Apollo Theatre in NYC, he became the first mainstream American journalist to interview and write about the young B.B. King.
Alan Lomax and Library of Congress
After his decade of active fieldwork, Lowry worked with renowned ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax over two years at the Folklife Archives of the US Library of Congress on a project that later became "The Deep River of Song" series of CDs, a comprehensive collection of African American musics that was later commercially issued by Rounder Records in their "Alan Lomax Collection". The complete collection of Lowry's own field recorded material is copied and held in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center Archive of Folk Culture. More recently, his tapes have been deposited with The Southern Folklife Center at UNC - Chapel Hill (NC). It will be possible for interested members of the public to listen to any of them at either location for research purposes.
Writings on music
Lowry has been writing about African American music since 1964 beginning with Blues Unlimited in the UK. He has since written for Blues & Rhythm (UK), Cadence (US), Jazz Digest/HIP (US), Jazz Times (US), Juke Blues (UK), Living Blues (US), Penguin Eggs (CN), Rhythms (in Melbourne, Australia), Rolling Stone, The International Association of Jazz Record Collectors Journal (US), and Western Folklore (US), among others.
His most recent series of articles in Blues & Rhythm magazine is called "The Stuff Was Still There - More Traveling & Recording The Blues". Along with an earlier series ("Oddenda & Such"), it tells the stories of his record label, Trix Records, the artists he located (and interviewed), recorded, and promoted along with the trials and tribulations of doing field research in the South East in the 1970s, plus the folly of owning and supporting a specialist blues music record label! See his website listed below.
Education and current endeavors
A graduate of Princeton University, Lowry holds an MS from Rutgers University in Zoology and Serology, studied medicine at Columbia University and Université Libre de Bruxelles and was a university lecturer in the biological sciences at SUNY New Paltz. Lowry later enrolled at The University of Pennsylvania in the PhD program in the Folklore Department, acquiring a master's degree and completing most of his doctoral studies (ABD). He has taught at a number of schools and universities as a visiting scholar and is currently working on a book on Piedmont Blues, entitled Truckin' My Blues Away: Piedmont Blues in Context, among other projects. Lowry moved permanently to Australia in 1995.