Sean M. Conrey is an assistant director in the Project Advance program at Syracuse University, where he teaches in the English and Textual Studies department. His first full length book of poetry, The Word in Edgewise, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2014.

Poet's note: Alan Lomax's complete audio and video recordings have recently been made available online and with those recordings a series of Youtube channels have been created to host video selections from his visits to the Mississippi Delta and Hill Country, Appalachia, Louisiana and elsewhere, presumably to widen the reach of the archives (which are available in a more complete collection through The Association for Cultural Equity website). While watching clips of some songs recently I became interested in the politics and poetry of how the auto-captioning feature was translating the lyrics. The colloquial and regional nature of the language spoken in most of the clips is such that the auto-generator produces a text that is barely comprehensible grammatically while still seeming to register a loose scan of the lines being sung and spoken. Even more interesting to me was the fact that the auto-generated lines seem to offer an augmentation and commentary to the actual lyrics that is current (most of the clips posted are 30+ years old) but still seem to address some of the cultural markers that we expect when listening to songs like these.