If you happened to frequent folk music events in Northern California in the late 1950s or ’60s, it’s likely you would have run across a burly aficionado armed with a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder. Whatever the occasion — the annual iterations of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, performances in clubs like the still-thriving Freight & Salvage, or casual house parties where musicians gathered to play and sing — Alan Oakes was apt to be there, documenting the proceedings.

现在，Oakes的遗产是从价值约40小时的现场录音中汲取的，已经为更广泛的观众提供了。“The Village Out West: The Lost Tapes of Alan Oakes,” a meticulously prepared album set for release Friday, Sept. 24, by Smithsonian Folkways, uses Oakes’ field recordings to provide a panoramic view of the folk music revival as it unfolded over more than a decade in Berkeley, Marin and Fresno.

51个选择包括一系列音乐家，包括全国舞台的头条新闻 - 包括布鲁斯大师密西西比州弗雷德·麦克道威尔，福音歌手加里·戴维斯牧师和传奇的吉他拾音器Doc Watson-到当地身材的表演者。标题表明，这是一个与同时在纽约的格林威治村庄同时进行的知名民间复兴的世界，这是一个与知名的民间复兴不同的世界。

“The difference is that New York started out with much more textured infrastructure,” explained Henry Sapoznik, the performer and historian of traditional music who served as a co-producer for the project. “There were more record labels, more small-power radio stations, more clubs.

“The Bay Area didn’t have those things, so it had to invent itself.”

The stylistic variety and scope of these recordings are themselves remarkable. Watson is joined by two Bay Area musicians, fiddler Hank Bradley and banjoist Rick Shubb, for a vivacious account of the fiddle tune “Beaumont Rag.” Singer Allan MacLeod offers an unaccompanied version of “The Hounds Are Out,” an English hunting ballad from the 19th century.

The vocal duo Kathy and Carol, best known for singing traditional American and English ballads, swing into “Searchin’,” the Leiber and Stoller song made famous by the Coasters. There are “talking blues” and Cajun dance melodies and comic novelty songs, too.

“态度是，‘我们将播放这种特殊的曲调，您会发挥自己的作用，我会带来影响力，”制片人黛博拉·罗宾斯（Deborah Robins）说。“这就是为什么这听起来不像在华盛顿广场公园（在格林威治村）表演的人。

“To put it in cooking terms, there was no recipe. You’re throwing all this stuff into the pot, hoping it will meld — and this is what ended up happening.”

Sapoznik, adopting a baseball metaphor, celebrated the “width of the strike zone” in what constitutes the repertoire.

“There’s no sense that it can only be an early Edwardian ballad with 30 verses, or a scratchy fiddle tune from an unnamed hollow,” he said. “There’s an exuberant inclusiveness about this scene.”

There was also a looseness to the musical collaborations, which often paired established stars with local amateurs.

提琴手布拉德利（Bradley）在几张唱片中饰演，他在最近的一次采访中回忆说，他和沃森（Watson）如何一起投掷。

“I was performing solo at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, which was how the fiddle had been played for centuries in America,” he said. “And after a tune or two this soft voice came out of the crowd and said, ‘Hey, sonny, would you mind a little guitar accompaniment up there?’ And that was Doc Watson himself.”

The reason these performances can be heard today is because Oakes, a civil engineer who died in 2019, recorded them for no other reason than his own music-geek satisfaction.

“Alan was a presence at several different kinds of festivals and gatherings,” said Robins, who knew Oakes during the last decades of his life. “He was a large, kind of hulking presence, and he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would be able to slip in and out of social scenes. Yet he was sort of Zelig-like — a scenester who was able to show up at a lot of different places without being too in the way. That’s how he got so many of these recordings.”

到1970年代初，奥克斯已经停止制作录像带，而他收集的那些人正在阁楼上收集灰尘。奥克斯（Oakes）的妻子玛妮（Marnie）去世后，与近年来民间狂欢节赛道的熟人罗宾斯（Robins）联系，看看是否有什么可做的。

罗宾斯回忆说：“她说，‘我正在移动，我必须摆脱碎片。”“我告诉她，‘送他们一起，我们会看到我们有什么。’”

That launched Robins onto a yearlong project that occupied her during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. She consulted with Oakland sound engineer Wally McClellan to ascertain whether the tapes were even salvageable — a quest that began with the search for the right playback equipment — and to clean them up to a professional level.

“通过现场录音，没有任何音板或混音。…但是艾伦（Alan）如此细微和关怀做到了这一点。”罗宾斯说。“他从事自己的业务，将自己放在任何给定房间的最佳地点。他不是一个坐在后排的人说：“好吧，我会看到我得到的。”

Once the tapes were playable, Robins enlisted Sapoznik to catalog them and figure out which performances would include repertoire not heard elsewhere. She also had to get the musicians’ heirs to sign legal releases, a task that drew on her background in intellectual property rights management.

“This was all very informal,” she said. “Nobody signed anything with Alan, because nothing was ever expected to come of this in terms of commercial exploitation. But I knew I couldn’t bring these materials anywhere else without owning them myself.”

这是对Oakes作为工程师技能的致敬，这些录音是在几乎偶然的情况下拍摄的，听起来如此生动和直接。表演很清脆，背景几乎不存在。

罗宾斯说：“艾伦并不是想成为唱片制作人。”“这只是为了他自己的乐趣。他非常喜欢音乐和人们，以至于他希望能够在几天和几周后回家听音乐。”

“西部的村庄：艾伦·奥克斯（Alan Oakes）的丢失录像带”从9月24日星期五开始，可以25美元的价格购买。