The remarkable voices, songs and images in the recently released box set Alan Lomax in Haiti are a stunning, delightful treasure, a vivid portrait of a time and place.

On the set's 10 discs average people sing their everyday stories, berate corrupt politicians, celebrate children's toys, lament lost loves or call on the spirits. The singers were recorded by musicologist Lomax more than 70 years ago with a cumbersome, portable aluminum-disk system, and the results were so discouragingly noisy and distorted that the project was set aside until new technology and a slow, painstaking effort over the past decade restored the hidden music. As Alan Lomax in Haiti (Harte, $129) proves, time has not weakened its spirit.

Ethnomusicologist, author and Haiti scholar Gage Averill, who was instrumental in cataloging, compiling and annotating the material, recently recalled being at a conference in Chicago and about to introduce dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, a champion of Haitian culture.

``I had my notes, and then I remember I had this Alan Lomax material in my computer,'' says Averill, vice principal and dean of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. ``As it turned out, Alan had been in the temple, a month or so later, where Katherine Dunham had received her initiation in voudou. So I went over to her and said `Ms. Dunham I have recordings of people you know in Pont Beudet, including Théoline Marseille and Cecile Esperance.' And she looked at me as if she had seen a ghost and said, `Yes, of course. Please.' So I played this recording for the audience, and at the end she got up in tears and said to me: `You know, you have a govi in there. You really truly have a govi [an object that temporarily shelters the souls of the dead].' So I came to think about these recordings as digital govi.''

SNAPSHOT OF LIFE

If Lomax's recordings do not store souls, the music and images he captured in his four-month stay in Haiti beginning in the middle of December 1936 nonetheless provide an extraordinary snapshot of the daily life, celebrations and expressions of belief of a people at a particular time in their history.

Lomax, who died at 87 in the Pasco County town of Holiday in 2002, was an extraordinary figure. In a career spanning six decades, he worked as folklorist, ethnomusicologist, author, record producer, singer, concert promoter, radio host and activist for the world's folk music. He arrived in Haiti barely two years after the end of it 19-year U.S. military occupation.

As Anna Lomax Wood, his daughter and one of the project's producers, notes, this was ``a pivotal era in Haiti's cultural story, when the country was throwing off U.S. imperialism and embracing both its African roots and the coming influence of jazz and African American / Afro-Caribbean popular music and dance.''

The Lomax recordings include a set of meringues, considered by some the national music of Haiti and played here with courtly elegance by urban dance bands, and a disc of songs by twoubadou, rustic troubadours accompanied by small string ensembles. There is a volume of Mardi Gras and Carnaval music; other discs are dedicated to voudou ritual music (``Lomax was the first to record a voudou ceremony from start to finish,'' Averill says), children's songs and work songs.

There are also fascinating examples of Rara music -- a cultural and religious tradition in which bands play music and dance in the streets -- and of the almost-extinct Romance song, a mix of archaic French and Creole.