Name: Ancestor Sounds Direct From Manufacturer
Brand: Al Africatown
SKU: SK0242607-US20260105-083122
Availability: InStock

DISC: 1

1. Run, If You Can (Don’t Go Down That Road)

2. Family Secret

3. Do You Hear Me Now?

4. Lead Me Home

5. Black Part of Town

6. Illegal Factory (Smokestack Sighs)

7. Africatown in Their Face

8. Kept Me

9. First Thing He Did When Freed Was Build a Drum

10. Haunted By Her Capture

11. Sent to Vietnam, But Never Been to Africa

12. Only Black School

13. Reconstructed Memory

14. Cudjoe’s Statue Defiled

15. Birdsong Beside the Refinery

16. Walk with Thee

17. Graveyard Shift Emissions

18. The Blues Returns (Taking Flight)

More Info:

A collection of landmark recordings of residents from the Africatown neighborhood in Mobile, AL, Ancestor Sounds features descendants from the Clotilda, the last ship to bring enslaved people across the Atlantic to America. Conceived by GRAMMY-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) and filmmaker and photographer Marilena Umuhoza Delli, the project features accompaniment from the local community as well as ambient recordings from the factories that surround and pollute the community. Meant as an impressionistic document rather than a definitive historical narrative, it was captured on-site as live, first takes. The outdoor nature of the recordings graphically renders the encroaching and ominous industrial sounds and foregrounds the environmental racism that has plagued the community. These surprising and often arresting “ancestor sounds” resonate across centuries and continents on this important, irreplaceable document.