This stunning text, CD, and DVD package is, at its very least, a corrective to the dominance of field sources that has often threatened to equate US folk music with that of Appalachia, the Delta, or elsewhere in the American South. The far-reaching influence of such seminal recordings as Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) or revival string bands like the New Lost City Ramblers has done much to attach an Appalachian or black southern character to the identity of “American folk music” at large – hence the chosen title of Leary's package: Folksongs of Another America. Following the regional emphases of Alan Lomax (who maintains a significant presence in this output) and, for example, Norm Cohen's American Folk Songs: A Regional Encyclopedia (2008), Leary has produced a hefty compendium of over 180 songs culled from the roughly two thousand collected by Lomax, Sidney Robertson, and Helen Stratman-Thomas throughout Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin during the 1930s and 1940s. These songs – in over twenty-five languages, a vast array of ballads, dance tunes, street songs, hymns, and localized topical anthems – mark the collective voice of a largely immigrant, working-class population completely ignored by the commercial agents and field collectors whose southern focus, while giving birth to something loosely called “country music,” has done so much to obscure or marginalize the folk expression of other American regions.

The partnership between the University of Wisconsin Press and the unashamedly preservationist Dust-to-Digital recording company founded by Lance Ledbetter has produced a detailed, scrupulously annotated collection of Upper Mid-western musics, beginning with a CD of Sidney Robertson's recordings of Wisconsin and Minnesota lumberjacks, as well as Serbian, Scots Gaelic, and Finnish performers (under the disc title of “Pigtown Fling”). The Wisconsin Lumberjacks have a full CD (“The River in the Pines”) devoted to their performances as recorded by Robertson and Lomax at a series of folk festivals in the late 1930s. Lomax's Michigan field recordings of 1938 come into their own on a dedicated CD entitled “Harps and Accordions,” presenting a cross-section of Swedish, Polish, Lithuanian, Irish, German, Finnish, French Canadian, and Ojibwe performers (as well as a further sampling of the rich body of lumberjack songs).

There are two CDs devoted to the Helen Stratman-Thomas recordings. “When the Dance Is Over” comprises Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and pan-Indian songs and dances; French Canadian, Belgian (Walloon), Welsh, and Cornish story-songs; African American and Anglo-American tales, songs, and riddles; and – once again – lumberjack and Irish American songs. The second Stratman-Thomas CD, “My Father Was a Dutchman,” offers a dazzling sample from the German and Austrian, Swiss, Luxemburger, Italian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Lithuanian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic communities of the Upper Mid-west. How far we have traveled from Harry Smith's Anthology! The audiovisual package concludes with a DVD documentary, “Alan Lomax Goes North,” chronicling through footage, field recordings, and voice-over readings from field notes and correspondence Lomax's remarkable collecting journey of 1938.

The CDs and DVD are the true gems of the package, but Leary's richly illustrated accompanying text, which reproduces all the song lyrics as well as regional histories and biographies of the performers and collectors, is indispensable for a full appreciation of the sonic record's value. The quality of the audio recordings is impressive, given the threatened, deteriorating condition of much of the source material. This project, in its totality, goes beyond simple preservation; it is recovery work of the highest order, introducing us to an almost lost stratum of American folk expression. The audiovisual–textual format serves as a superb model for subsequent enterprises and it is hoped that many more such partnerships as this one between Wisconsin and Dust-to-Digital will follow.