Peter B. Lowry (f/k/a Pete Lowry), is a folklorist, writer, record producer, ethnomusicologist, historian, photographer, and teacher on popular music in his seventies specializing in blues,[1][2] and jazz with a primary focus on the Piedmont blues of the south-eastern United States.
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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,[3] initially working in collaboration with British folklorist Bruce Bastin.[4] 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) and "I've Been Around" (David "Honeyboy" Edwards).[5]
In the early 1970s Peter B. Lowry founded Trix Records, which proceeded to issue six 45s and 17 full length LP's,[6] from his hundreds of hours of field recordings. Trix artists included the stepson of Blues legend Robert Johnson, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Detroit and Macon, GA's Eddie Kirkland, 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 [7] and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.[8] Trix Records remained active for two decades before the issued LP masters and company name were sold to Joe Fields of Muse Records, in New York. It was subsequently sold on to 32 Jazz/Blues, also in NYC, before ending with JVC's Savoy Jazz imprint. Lowry also produced albums for Atlantic Records[9] (at the urging of Atlantic's founder Ahmet Ertegun), Muse Records, Savoy Records,[10] Columbia Records[11], Biograph Records and other companies. He began writing about blues music for Blues Unlimited in the UK in 1964 when, at the Apollo Theatre in NYC, he became the first mainstream American journalist to interview and write about the young B.B. King.[12]
After his decade of active fieldwork, Lowry worked with renowned ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax over two years at the US Library of Congress on a project that later became "The Deep River of Song",[13] a comprehensive collection of African American musics that was later commercially issued by Rounder Records 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 Archive of Folk Culture.[14]
Peter B. Lowry has been writing about music since 1964. He has written for Blues & Rhythm, Blues Unlimited, Jazz Digest/HIP, Jazz Times,[15] Juke Blues,[16] Living Blues, Penguin Eggs,[17] Rhythms,[18] Rolling Stone[19], The IAJRC Journal and Western Folklore,[20] 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.
A graduate of Princeton University, Peter B. Lowry holds an MS from Rutgers University in Zoology and Serology, studied medicine at Columbia University[21] and Universite Libre de Bruxelles[22] and was a university lecturer in the biological sciences at SUNY New Paltz. Lowry later enrolled at The University of Pennsylvania[23] in the PhD program in the Folklore 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 and its contexts.