Peter B. Lowry
Encyclopedia
Peter B. Lowry is a folklorist, writer, record producer, ethnomusicologist, historian, photographer, and teacher on popular music in his seventies specializing in blues,Harris, Jeff "Some Ramblings On Peter B. Lowry, Field Recording & The Trix Label" Big Road Blues and jazz with a primary focus on the Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues refers primarily to a guitar style, the Piedmont fingerstyle, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger,...

 of the south-eastern United States.

Ethnomusicological Field Research

Mr. Lowry traveled the South Eastern United States over a decade in the 1970s and 80's doing field-work and 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
Bruce Bastin
Bruce Bastin is a folklorist and a leading expert on the blues styles of the South Eastern states of America ....

. His field research also took him to the Midwestern US, where he recorded local pianists for the album "Detroit After Hours - Vol. 1" and on to Chicago to record the blues albums "Goin' Back Home" (Homesick James
Homesick James
Homesick James was an American blues musician. He most notably played slide guitar, and recorded covers of "Stones In My Passway" and "Homesick"...

) and "I've Been Around" (David "Honeyboy" Edwards).

Trix Records

In the early 1970s Peter B. Lowry founded Trix Records
Trix Records
Trix Records was a record label set up in 1972 by folklorist Peter B. Lowry.It lasted just under a decade as an active label dealing mainly with Piedmont blues artists from the Southeastern states , together with the anthology Detroit After Hours, a collection of Detroit piano players...

, which proceeded to issue six 45s and 17 full length LP's, from his hundreds of hours of field recordings. Trix artists included the stepson of Blues legend Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson
Robert Leroy Johnson was an American blues singer and musician. His landmark recordings from 1936–37 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given...

, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Detroit and Macon, GA's Eddie Kirkland
Eddie Kirkland
Eddie Kirkland was an American electric blues guitarist, harmonicist, singer, and songwriter.Kirkland, known as the "Gypsy of the Blues" for his rigorous touring schedules, played and toured with John Lee Hooker from 1949 to 1962...

, and Chicago's David "Honeyboy" Edwards. The 92 year old Edwards was the oldest musician to perform in Washington at the official celebration of the inauguration of his country's first African American president, Edwards' neighbor, Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

  and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded by the Recording Academy to "performers who, during their lifetimes, have made creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording."...

 in 2010. Trix Records remained active for two decades before the issued LP masters and company name were sold to Joe Fields
Joe Fields
Joseph Charles Fields, Jr. is a former professional American football center and guard in the National Football League for the New York Jets and the New York Giants...

 of Muse Records
Muse Records
Muse Records was an American record label which released jazz and blues music.Muse was founded in the early 1970s by Joe Fields, who had previously worked as an executive for Prestige Records in the 1960s...

, in New York. It was subsequently sold on to 32 Jazz
32 Jazz
-Discography:...

/Blues, also in NYC, before ending with JVC's Savoy Jazz imprint. Lowry also produced albums for Atlantic Records
Atlantic Records
Atlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...

 (at the urging of Atlantic's founder Ahmet Ertegun
Ahmet Ertegun
Ahmet Ertegün was a Turkish American musician and businessman, best known as the founder and president of Atlantic Records. He also wrote classic blues and pop songs and served as Chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and museum...

), Muse Records
Muse Records
Muse Records was an American record label which released jazz and blues music.Muse was founded in the early 1970s by Joe Fields, who had previously worked as an executive for Prestige Records in the 1960s...

, Savoy Records
Savoy Records
Savoy Records is an American record label specializing in jazz, R&B and gospel. Starting in the mid 1940s, Savoy played an important part in popularizing bebop.Savoy Records is an American record label specializing in jazz, R&B and gospel. Starting in the mid 1940s, Savoy played an important part...

, Columbia Records
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...

, Biograph Records
Biograph Records
Biograph Records is a record label founded in 1967 by Arnold S. Caplin. It specialized in early American ragtime, jazz, and blues music. Biograph was the first label to issue records made from piano rolls created by Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton and George Gershwin.In 2002, Biograph Records was...

 and other companies. He began writing about blues music for Blues Unlimited
Blues Unlimited
Blues Unlimited was a British monthly music magazine dealing with all aspects of blues music. Co-founded in 1963 by Simon A...

 in the UK in 1964 when, at the Apollo Theatre
Apollo Theatre
The Apollo Theatre is a Grade II listed West End theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster. Designed by architect Lewin Sharp for owner Henry Lowenfield, and the fourth legitimate theatre to be constructed on the street, its doors opened on 21 February 1901 with the American...

 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
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...

 over two years at the US Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

 on a project that later became "The Deep River of Song", a comprehensive collection of African American musics that was later commercially issued by Rounder Records
Rounder Records
Rounder Records, originally of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but now based in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a record label founded in 1970 by Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton-Levy, while all three were still university students...

 in their "Alan Lomax Collection". The complete collection of Lowry's own field recorded material is held in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife" . The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music...

 Archive of Folk Culture.

Writings on Music

Peter B. Lowry has been writing about music since 1964. He has written for Blues & Rhythm
Blues & Rhythm
Blues & Rhythm, The Gospel Truth is a British music magazine dealing with all aspects of blues and gospel music. Founded in July 1984 it is - along with its American counterpart Living Blues - considered one of the premier magazines for all aspects of blues and rhythm & blues music Blues & Rhythm,...

, Blues Unlimited
Blues Unlimited
Blues Unlimited was a British monthly music magazine dealing with all aspects of blues music. Co-founded in 1963 by Simon A...

, Jazz Digest/HIP, Jazz Times, Juke Blues
Juke Blues
Juke Blues is a British magazine covering blues, R&B, gospel, soul, zydeco and jazz. It was established in 1985 in London by Cilla Huggins, John Broven and Bez Turner, and is now published at least twice a year in Bath, Somerset, England...

, Living Blues
Living Blues
Living Blues is a bi-monthly magazine focused on covering the African American blues tradition, and America's oldest blues periodical. The magazine was founded as a quarterly in Chicago in 1970 by Jim O'Neal and Amy van Singel. Alligator Records owner and founder Bruce Iglauer was also one of the...

, Penguin Eggs
Penguin Eggs
Penguin Eggs is an album by Nic Jones, released in 1980. Allmusic described the album as "one of those rare records where not just every song, but each instrumental part is worth hearing"....

, Rhythms, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

, The IAJRC Journal and Western Folklore
Western Folklore
Western Folklore is a quarterly academic journal for the study of folklore published by the Western States Folklore Society. It was established in 1942 as the California Folklore Quarterly and obtained its current name in 1947...

, among others. (See select publications below).
His most recent on-going 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 story of his record label, Trix Records, the artists he "discovered", recorded and promoted along with the trials and tribulations of doing field research in the South East, plus owning and supporting a specialist blues music record label.

Education and Current Endeavors

A graduate of Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, Peter B. Lowry holds an MS from Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

 in Zoology and Serology, studied medicine at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and Universite Libre de Bruxelles
Université Libre de Bruxelles
The Université libre de Bruxelles is a French-speaking university in Brussels, Belgium. It has 21,000 students, 29% of whom come from abroad, and an equally cosmopolitan staff.-Name:...

 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
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 Department, acquiring a Masters Degree and completing his doctoral studies. He has taught at a number of schools and universities as a visiting scholar and is currently working on a book on Piedmont Blues
Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues refers primarily to a guitar style, the Piedmont fingerstyle, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger,...

and its contexts.

Select Publications

  • Lowry, Peter B. (2010) "Blues in the Southeast USA - More Travellin' & Recording The Blues" ("The Stuff Was Still There" series) Blues & Rhythm, April, May, June, July, & Sept 2010 - continuing
  • Lowry, Peter B. (2010) Review of Jazz by Gary Giddins & Scott DeVeaux, in: The IAJRC Journal, Vol. 43, #3, Sept 2010, pp.  30 –32.
  • Lowry, Peter B., (2009) Review of Edward Komara, ed., The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues, in: Western Folklore Vol. 68, No. 2/3 —Spring 2009; p. 321.
  • Lowry, Peter B. (2009) "DIY Fieldwork: George Mitchell's Southern Trawlings" in Rhythms (Melbourne) #203/June, pp.  26 –27.
  • Lowry, Peter B. (2006) Review of Louis Armstrong & Paul Whiteman. Two Kings of Jazz, by Joshua Berrett, in: IAJRC Journal, 39/3 , pp.  89 – 90
  • Welker, Gaile & Lowry, Peter B. (2006) entry "Piedmont Blues" in The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues, ed. Edward Komara (New York: Routledge). ISBN 0-415-92699-8.
  • Lowry, Peter B. (2005) review of Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997: in Western Folklore - Winter, p. 368.
  • Lowry, Peter B. (2002) “Alan Lomax: Twentieth Century Icon” – Rhythms (Melbourne) #122, pp.  36 – 38.
  • Lowry, Peter B. (1977) "Atlanta Black Sound: A Survey of Black music from Atlanta During the 20th Century" in The Atlanta Historical Bulletin, Vol. II, No. 2, pp.  88 – 113.
  • Lowry, Peter B. as "Pete Lowry" - extensive articles for Blues Unlimited (Sussex, UK), 1964 - 1975.
  • Ford, Robert. name entry in A Blues Bibliography (Bromley, Kent: Paul Pelletier Publishing, 1999; 2nd edition, New York: Routledge, 2007).
  • Komara, Edward. name entry in The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues (New York: Routledge). ISBN 0-415-92699-8.

External links

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