Vera Hall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vera Hall was an American folk singer. She was born in 1902 near Livingston, Alabama, and died in 1964. Hall was married to a coal miner named Nash Riddle and she gave birth to her first child, Minnie Ada, in 1917.
[edit] Discovery by ethnomusicologists
In Livingston in 1937, Hall met John Avery Lomax, an ethnomusicologist who recorded American folk music.[1] Lomax recorded Hall singing numerous songs that were put into the United States Library of Congress for preservation. Lomax's son, Alan, also championed Vera Hall -- bringing her to New York for a performance at Columbia University in 1948 and assembling Rainbow Sign, a book based on Hall's life and stories.
[edit] Impact
She is most famous to contemporary audiences for being sampled by Moby on his hit single, "Natural Blues". The sample was taken from the song "Trouble so Hard". Hall's record, "Another Man Done Gone," was played on the BBC in 1943 as a highlight to American folk music. Also, "Another Man Gone" was played by Congress to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
