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The Global Jukebox. Association for Cultural Equity. https://theglobaljukebox.org/.

“It still remains for us to learn how we can put our magnificent mass communications technology at the service of each and every branch of the human family,” folklorist Alan Lomax mused in the early 1980s, intrigued by the way computers might help scholars reach a public and global audience.1 The Global Jukebox is a new online database of Lomax’s field recordings collected from around the world. The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE)—an organization founded by Lomax in 1983 and overseen today by Lomax’s daughter, anthropologist Anna Lomax Wood—launched the site on April 18, 2017, realizing Lomax’s vision for a technology that would allow him to organize, to analyze, and to share his recordings. The Global Jukebox will be of interest to scholars of vernacular music for the ways it actualizes the methods Alan Lomax used throughout the twentieth century in an interactive format. As an archive, the Jukebox makes available 5,800 field recordings from six hundred cultures, and the database offers users a pathway to discover recordings and to build cross-cultural comparisons between recordings. The database is also useful for modeling Lomax’s theory of cantometrics— his method for analyzing, and system for classifying, folk music—but revisiting Lomax’s work in the twenty-first century raises questions regarding the limitations of this method and the ethics of folksong collection. The Jukebox has digitized the physical recordings from Alan Lomax’s collection at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, which includes recordings collected by both Lomax and his folklorist colleagues. Users can traverse the archive through two different interfaces: a map with songs organized by geography or a wheel of songs organized by cultural groups. Additionally, the site’s search function allows users to find examples of a particular genre, such as lullabies or work songs, across cultures. The site invites discovery and is easy to navigate, making it an exciting resource for scholars and students alike. Readers of this journal will be especially interested in using the database as an archive of recordings from North, South, and Central America, as well as global vernacular traditions that have legacies in American musics. For example, the Jukebox includes a recording of the murder ballad “Cruel Mother” from County Leitrim in Ireland. This particular performance, which features traditional singer Thomas Moran, was collected by famous Irish folklorist Séamus Ennis in 1954. This ballad has connections to traditions in Appalachian music, and conducting a genre search for “murder ballads” on the map interface shows the ties between Irish and Appalachian song cultures, linking “The Cruel Mother” with recordings of Estil C. Ball singing “Pretty Polly” and “Poor Ellen Smith,” which Lomax collected in Virginia in 1959. The Jukebox further encourages users to make these transnational comparisons between the