Alan Lomax is a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He began making field recordings with his father, a fellow folklorist, John Lomax, of American folk music for the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song. Throughout his six decades of pivotal work, Lomax travelled all over the United States, as well as to the Carribean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain (where he was hounded by Franco’s fascist police), and Italy. Aside from turning the Archive of American Folk Song into one of the most important music resources in the world, Lomax wrote numerous books on music, hosted radio shows in the United States (CBS) and Britain (BBC), and even brought a concert series to New York called The Midnight Special.
Alan Lomax has played an incredibly important role in the preservation of classic folk music, and helped introduce such artists as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Jelly Roll Morton to the world.
http://www.radioopensource.org/lomax/
We’re listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There’s outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode “Take a Whiff on Me” in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie accompanying himself, Pete Seeger and others on “Bound to Lose,” playing a guitar with a label on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And then there are the strangely uplifting choruses of prison work songs from the Angola Convict Sugar Plantation in Louisiana and the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi — songs like “Rosie,” which Lomax recorded in 1947 with prisoners, “C. B. and the Axe Gang.” As John Szwed writes in his vivid biography of the protean Lomax, “This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.”
Alan Lomax with unidentified man. [Library of Congress photo]Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned. Makes you wonder: what is the music of the meltdown today, and where’s to find it?
John Szwed [Martha Rose photo]Alan Lomax brought a roaring confidence to new fields opening up in the 30s. There was something of the great Edison in Lomax’s recording chops as the tech kept improving. He had something of John Hammond’s talent-spotting gift in the period when Hammond was signing Billie Holiday and the Count Basie band for Columbia Records. “He’s got an infallible ear for the un-commercial,” Hammond said dismissively. There was also something of Orson Welles in Lomax’s showmanship — maybe something of Elvis Presley in Lomax’s fantasies. Lomax was open to rock’n'roll, despite its commercialism, and he was soft on Elvis — not least, John Szwed remarks in our conversation, because Elvis did what Alan wanted to do: liberate the white man’s hips! Even as he coopted so much black musical style, Elvis was the herald of a great healing shift in racial cultures.
Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/arts/alan-lomax-who-raised-voice-of-folk-music-in-us-dies-at-87.html?scp=1&sq=alan%20lomax%20obit&st=cse
Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice Of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
Correction Appended
Alan
Lomax, the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to
record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie,
died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.
Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called ''cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.''
Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.
Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called ''cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.''
Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.
''What
Caruso was to singing, Alan Lomax is to musicology,'' the oral
historian Studs Terkel said in 1997. ''He is a key figure in
20th-century culture.''
In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as ''a missionary.''
Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. ''It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,'' he once said. ''I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.''
To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.
''The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them,'' Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, ''were just as good as anybody else.''
Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.
''The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances,'' Mr. Lomax recalled. ''There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.''
Discovering the Greats
One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums ''Negro Sinful Songs'' in 1939 and ''The Midnight Special,'' prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song ''Goodnight Irene,'' and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.
Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, ''Mister Jelly Roll,'' which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.
In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as ''a missionary.''
Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. ''It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,'' he once said. ''I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.''
To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.
''The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them,'' Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, ''were just as good as anybody else.''
Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.
''The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances,'' Mr. Lomax recalled. ''There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.''
Discovering the Greats
One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums ''Negro Sinful Songs'' in 1939 and ''The Midnight Special,'' prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song ''Goodnight Irene,'' and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.
Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, ''Mister Jelly Roll,'' which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.
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