FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A conversation between a white, middle-class ethnomusicologist and a poor black Mississippi sharecropper named McKinley Morganfield changed the course of music forever and demonstrates the power of anthropological research, according to a University of Arkansas researcher.

Laura Helper, the marketing director for the University of Arkansas Press and a professional anthropologist, presented "Song of the South: Mississippi Field Recordings and Their Influential Echoes" at the American Anthropological Association's recent annual meeting. Helper was part of a panel that explored how anthropology and popular culture have shaped each other.

Helper explored the influence of Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist and "folk song hunter" who traveled from the Library of Congress to Mississippi in 1941 to record traditional music. She asked the question: How did his recording machine end up in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

Seeking out isolated populations where such music thrived, Lomax visited the notorious Parchman Prison and the Stovall Plantation. On Stovall he met Morganfield, a sharecropper who played guitar and ran a juke joint in his free time. Hearing his own voice on the recording, Morganfield decided to move to Chicago. There, as Muddy Waters, he recorded a series of electrified urban blues tunes that later influenced groups like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. Meanwhile, Lomax sought to use modern technology against modern industrialization — he wanted both to save cultures being lost to technological change and to distribute technology more equally across society.

Helper examines Lomax's idea of "fieldwork" as salvage anthropology, and contrasts it with Muddy Waters' own experience of music, travel, and actual cotton fields. She also looks at the many other people who ventured into Mississippi like it was a foreign country or like it was the anthropological field. For Mississippi was not quite as isolated as Lomax imagined.

In the 1930s, anthropologists studied race relations in small "static" communities even as black laborers started migrating from the cotton fields to Chicago factories. Lomax started visiting in the late 30s and recorded Muddy Waters in 1941. In the 1950s, record scouts and producers scoured the South in search of new sounds that would appeal to masses of Southerners who were moving north. And starting in the 1950s, representations of Mississippi in newspapers, magazines, and television programs inspired white and black Americans to go to Mississippi to organize black voters and to support local protests against segregation.

None of these people were professional anthropologists, and yet, Helper argues, they were doing fieldwork, which is the distinctive methodology of the discipline.

"In fieldwork, you go to a new place, you expose yourself to something and see what happens," said Helper. She argues that anthropologists can learn from the kinds of work that these cultural brokers did — even though they had a vested interest in the outcome of their encounters. "Everybody has biases, but the point isn't to overcome the biases," Helper said. "Instead, we should look at them and say, 'What did that enable them to see and to do?’" She concludes that "the field" can include these kinds of visitors and the representations they produced, like Lomax’s recording of Muddy Waters.

Helper’s presentation and the others made during the panel will become part of an edited volume on popular anthropology.