Crowds of young banjo players, guitarists, fiddlers, and fans were gathering in Washington Square Park to pick and sing traditional songs and tunes, many of which Lomax had recorded years earlier from musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Hobart Smith, and Texas Gladden.
He commented 40 years later: Some of the young folkniks, who dominated the New York scene, asserted that there was more folk music in Washington Square on Sunday afternoon than there was in all rural America.
The idea that these nice young people, who were only just beginning to learn how to play and sing in good style, might replace the glories of the real thing, frankly horrified me.
For the next two months the pair traveled through Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, making over 70 hours of recordings.
It marked the first stereo recordings made of American traditional music in the field, at last doing justice to the sonic complexity of the Georgia Sea Island ring shouts, the many-voiced work songs of the Southern prison farms, and the thunderous hymnody of the Sacred Harp.
When Lomax returned to New York City in late October 1959, he prepared seven albums for Atlantic, which were released as the "Southern Folk Heritage Series".
[10] There was much music left over, however, and Lomax ultimately made an arrangement with Prestige Records to issue another series entirely – twelve album volumes under the title "Southern Journey".
Numerous other issues and reissues of material from the recordings includes: The Atlantic and Prestige albums were proof that many old-timers were still alive and making music, and Lomax succeeded in involving these tradition-bearers directly in the folk revival.
He arranged for appearances at the Newport Folk Festival by Almeda Riddle, Fred McDowell, Hobart Smith, Ed Young, and Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, all of whom became frequent performers at other revival events and seminally influential figures of the era.
Lomax, sitting on the board of the Newport Foundation, also saw that money left over from the annual festivals was donated to traditional performers and to new documentation projects in the field.
Two sermon fragments from the recordings have been used by Kanye West on collaborations with Jay Z and Pusha T.[15] In 2011, the 50th anniversary of the Southern Journey, a season-long tribute series was curated in Belgium, put on by Ancienne Belgique.