All Topics  
Alan Lomax

 
Alan Lomax

   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link






 

Alan Lomax



 
 
Alan Lomax (January 15, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 folklorist
Folklore

Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, superstitions, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group ....
 and musicologist
Musicology

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture....
. He was one of the great field
Field work

Field work is a general descriptive term for the collection of raw data. The term is mainly used in the natural science and social sciences studies, such as in biology, ecology, environmental science, geology, geography, geophysics, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, and sociology, although it is also used...
 collectors of folk music
Folk music

Folk music can have a number of different meanings, including:* Traditional music: The original meaning of the term "folk music" was synonymous with the term "Traditional music", also often including World Music and Roots music; the term "Traditional music" was given its more specific meaning to distinguish it from the other definition...
 of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
, Great Britain
Great Britain

Great Britain is an island lying to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the List of islands by area, and the largest in Europe. With a population of 58.9 million people it is List of islands by population....
, Ireland
Ireland

Ireland is the List of islands by area in Europe, and the twentieth-largest island in the world. It lies to the north-west of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of islands and islet....
, the West Indies, Italy
Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
, and Spain
Spain

Spain or the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in Southern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though Espa?a , Estado espa?ol and Naci?n espa?ola are used interchangeably....
.

x was the son of pioneering musicologist and folklorist John A. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas
Texas

Texas is a U.S. state located in the South Central United States, nicknamed the Lone Star State. Texas is the second largest U.S. state in both area and population, spanning , and with a growing population of 24.3 million residents....
, Louisiana
Louisiana

The State of Louisiana is a U.S. state located in the U.S. Southern States of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans....
, and Mississippi
Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Deep South of the United States. Jackson, Mississippi is the state capital and largest city. The state's name comes from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, and takes its name from the Anishinaabe language word misi-ziibi ....
.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Alan Lomax'
Start a new discussion about 'Alan Lomax'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Alan Lomax (January 15, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 folklorist
Folklore

Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, superstitions, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group ....
 and musicologist
Musicology

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture....
. He was one of the great field
Field work

Field work is a general descriptive term for the collection of raw data. The term is mainly used in the natural science and social sciences studies, such as in biology, ecology, environmental science, geology, geography, geophysics, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, and sociology, although it is also used...
 collectors of folk music
Folk music

Folk music can have a number of different meanings, including:* Traditional music: The original meaning of the term "folk music" was synonymous with the term "Traditional music", also often including World Music and Roots music; the term "Traditional music" was given its more specific meaning to distinguish it from the other definition...
 of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
, Great Britain
Great Britain

Great Britain is an island lying to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the List of islands by area, and the largest in Europe. With a population of 58.9 million people it is List of islands by population....
, Ireland
Ireland

Ireland is the List of islands by area in Europe, and the twentieth-largest island in the world. It lies to the north-west of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of islands and islet....
, the West Indies, Italy
Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
, and Spain
Spain

Spain or the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in Southern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though Espa?a , Estado espa?ol and Naci?n espa?ola are used interchangeably....
.

Biography

Lomax was the son of pioneering musicologist and folklorist John A. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas
Texas

Texas is a U.S. state located in the South Central United States, nicknamed the Lone Star State. Texas is the second largest U.S. state in both area and population, spanning , and with a growing population of 24.3 million residents....
, Louisiana
Louisiana

The State of Louisiana is a U.S. state located in the U.S. Southern States of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans....
, and Mississippi
Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Deep South of the United States. Jackson, Mississippi is the state capital and largest city. The state's name comes from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, and takes its name from the Anishinaabe language word misi-ziibi ....
. Because of frail health he was mostly home schooled but for one year attended The Choate School
Choate Rosemary Hall

Choate Rosemary Hall is a private, college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school located in Wallingford, Connecticut. From its shared roots over a century ago as The Choate School and Rosemary Hall, through their merger in 1974, Choate Rosemary Hall is part of The Ten Schools Admissions Organization, along with several other New Englan...
 in Wallingford, Connecticut
Wallingford, Connecticut

Wallingford is a New England town in New Haven County, Connecticut, Connecticut, United States. The population was 43,026 at the 2000 United States Census....
. He enrolled at Harvard at the age of 16, but upon his mother's death interrupted his education to join his father's folk song collecting field trips. He subsequently earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin
University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a public university research university located in Austin, Texas, Texas, United States, and is the flagship#University campuses institution of University of Texas System....
 and also did graduate studies with Melville J. Herskovits
Melville J. Herskovits

Melville Jean Herskovits was an American anthropology who firmly established African studies and African American studies in American academia....
 at Columbia and with Ray Birdwhistell
Ray Birdwhistell

Ray Birdwhistell was an American anthropologist who founded kinesics as a field of inquiry and research. The term kinesics was originally coined by Birdwhistell, and he also proposed the term kineme....
 at the University of Pennsylvania. To some, he is best known for his theories of Cantometrics
Cantometrics

Cantometrics is a method for relating the statistical analysis of sonic elements of traditional vocal music to the statistical analysis of sociology traits, largely as those traits are defined and organized via the Human Relations Area Files....
, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics, elaborated from 1960 until his death with the help of collaborators Victor Grauer, Conrad Arensberg, Forrestine Paulay, and Roswell Rudd
Roswell Rudd

Roswell Rudd is an United States jazz trombone and composer.Although skilled in all styles of jazz and other genres of music, he is known primarily for his work in free jazz and avant-garde jazz....
.

From 1936 to 1942 Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books....
 to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings. During his lifetime, he collected folk music from the United States, Haiti, the Caribbean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture.

A pioneering oral historian, he also recorded substantial interviews with many legendary folk musicians, including Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie is best known as an United States singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, Traditional music and children's songs, ballads and improvised works....
, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters

McKinley Morganfield , better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician and is generally considered "the Father of Chicago blues"....
, Jelly Roll Morton
Jelly Roll Morton

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was an United States ragtime pianist, bandleader and composer.Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton claimed, in self-promotional hyperbole, to have invented jazz outright in 1902....
, Irish singer Margaret Barry
Margaret Barry

Margaret Barry was a Traditional Irish Singers and banjo player.Born in Cork into a family of Travellers and street singers, she taught herself how to play the zither banjo and the fiddle at an young age....
, Scots
Scottish people

The Scots people are a nation and an ethnic group indigenous to Scotland.Historically, as an ethnic group, they emerged from an amalgamation of Celts, Picts, Gaels and Brythons....
 ballad singer Jeannie Robertson
Jeannie Robertson

Jeannie Robertson was a Scotland folk music.It is not known where Jeannie Robertson was born but she did live at 90, Hilton Street in Aberdeen, where a plaque now commemorates her....
, and Harry Cox
Harry Cox

Harry Fred Cox , was a Norfolk farmworker and one of the most important singers of Folk Music of England of the twentieth century, on account of his large repertoire and fine singing style....
 of Norfolk, England, among many others. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor he took his recording machine into the streets to capture the reactions of everyday citizens. While serving in the army in World War II he made numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera," The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives
Burl Ives

Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives was an United States actor, writer and folk music singer. The prominent music critic John Rockwell has been quoted in the New York Times as saying that "Ives's voice......
, Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie is best known as an United States singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, Traditional music and children's songs, ballads and improvised works....
, Will Geer
Will Geer

Will Geer was an American actor. Geer's real name was William Aughe Ghere. He is remembered for his portrayal of the character Grandpa Walton, in the popular 1970s TV series The Waltons....
, Sonny Terry
Sonny Terry

Saunders Terrell, better known as Sonny Terry was a Blindness blues musician. He was most widely known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included human voice whoops and hollers, and imitations of trains and fox hunts....
, Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger

Peter "Pete" Seeger is an United States folk singer, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 50s as a member of The Weavers, most notably the 1950 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight, Irene" that topped the charts f...
, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith
Fiddlin' Arthur Smith

Fiddlin' Arthur Smith was an American old time fiddler and a big influence on the old time music and bluegrass music genres....
, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.

He also produced recordings, concerts, and radio
Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals, by modulation of electromagnetic radiation with frequency below those of visible light.Electromagnetic radiation radio propagation by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space....
 shows, in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American folk music revival
American folk music revival

The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States in the 1950s to mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, of course, since traditional folk music has thousands of years of history, and performers like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in decades prior to the 1950s....
 and British folk revivals of the 1940s and 50s. In the late 1940s, he produced a highly regarded series of folk music albums for Decca records and organized a series of concerts at New York's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, featuring blues, Calypso, and Flamenco music. He also hosted a radio show, Your Ballad Man, from 1945-49 that was broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Radio Network and featured a highly eclectic program, from gamelan
Gamelan

File:Javanese Gamelan.jpgA gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings....
 music, to Django Reinhardt
Django Reinhardt

Jean-Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt was a Belgian Gypsy jazz guitarist.One of the first prominent European jazz musicians, Reinhardt remains one of the most renowned jazz guitarists due to his innovative and distinctive playing....
, to Klezmer
Klezmer

Klezmer is a musical tradition which parallels Hasidic and Ashkenazic Judaism. Around the 15th century, a tradition of secular Jewish music was developed by musicians called klezmorim or kleyzmurim....
 music, to Sidney Bechet
Sidney Bechet

Sidney Bechet was an American jazz saxophone, clarinetist, and composer.He was one of the first important soloists in jazz , and was perhaps the first notable jazz saxophonist of any sort....
 and Wild Bill Davidson, to jazzy pop songs by Maxine Waters
Maxine Waters

Maxine Waters has served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1991, representing California's 35th congressional district ....
 and Jo Stafford
Jo Stafford

Jo Elizabeth Stafford was an United States singer of traditional pop music and jazz standards whose career ran from the late 1930s to the early 1960s....
, to readings of the poetry of Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was an United States writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln....
, to hillbilly music with electric guitars, to Finnish brass bands – to name a few.

Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly-invented LP records. For the British and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy
Peter Douglas Kennedy

Peter Douglas Kennedy was an England collector of folk songs in the 1950s. Peter's father, Douglas, was EFDSS director after Cecil Sharp.Kennedy was one of the presenters of the BBC folk music programme As I Roved Out, broadcast during the 1950s which involved collecting field recordings of folk singers....
, Scots poet Hamish Henderson
Hamish Henderson

'Hamish Scott Henderson', was a Scotland poet, songwriter, socialist, humanist, soldier, and intellectual.He has been called the most important Scots poet since Robert Burns, catalyst for the folk revival in Scotland, discoverer of Jeannie Robertson, the man who accepted the surrender of Italy on 19 April 1945, the author of the Freedom...
, and with Séamus Ennis
Séamus Ennis

S?amus Ennis was an Irish people piper, singer and folk music collector....
 in Ireland, where they recorded Irish traditional musicians, including some of the songs in English and Irish of Elizabeth Cronin
Elizabeth Cronin

Elizabeth "Bess" Cronin was an Ireland singer who specialized in traditional music.Born in West Cork, the daughter of Se?n ? hIarlaithe, a schoolteacher, she lived in the Baile Bhuirne area all her life....
 in 1951. He also hosted a folk music show on BBC's home service and organized a skiffle
Skiffle

Skiffle is a type of folk music with jazz, blues and country influences, usually using homemade or improvised instruments such as the washboard, tea chest bass, kazoo, cigar-box fiddle, musical saw, comb and paper, and so forth, as well as more conventional instruments such as Steel-string guitar and banjo....
 group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who included Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger
Peggy Seeger

Peggy Seeger, born June 17, 1935 in New York City, is an American folk singer. She is also well known in Britain, where she lived for more than 30 years with her husband, songwriter Ewan MacColl....
, and Shirley Collins
Shirley Collins

Shirley Elizabeth Collins Order of the British Empire was a significant contributor to the Music of the United Kingdom #Folk_music_and_roots_revival of the 1950s and 1960s....
, among others) which appeared on British television. His ballad opera Big Rock Candy Mountain premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood
Joan Littlewood

Joan Maud Littlewood was a British theatre director, noted for her work in developing the left-wing Theatre Workshop. She is regarded as "The Mother of Modern Theatre"....
's Theater Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot.

Lomax and Diego Carpitella
Diego Carpitella

Diego Carpitella Italy professor of ethnomusicology at La Sapienza University in Rome. He is considered one of the greatest scholars of Italian folk music....
's survey of Italian folk music
Italian folk music

Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. Italian unification came quite late to the Italian peninsula, so its many hundreds of separate cultures remained un-homogenized until quite recently compared to many other European countries....
 for the Columbia World Library, conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, helped capture a snapshot of a multitude of important traditional folk styles shortly before they disappeared. The pair amassed one of the most representative folk song collections of any culture. From Lomax's Spanish and Italian recordings emerged one of the first theories explaining the types of folk singing that predominate in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.

Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, "Folksong '59," in Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood
Jimmy Driftwood

James Corbitt Morris  — better known as Jimmy Driftwood or Jimmie Driftwood; was a prolific United States folk music songwriter and musician, most famous for his songs The Battle of New Orleans and Tennessee Stud....
; the Selah Jubilee Singers
Selah Jubilee Singers

The Selah Jubilee Singers was an United States gospel vocal quartet, who appeared in public as a gospel group but who also had a successful recording career as a secular group in the 1930s & 1940s....
 and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters

McKinley Morganfield , better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician and is generally considered "the Father of Chicago blues"....
 and Memphis Slim
Memphis Slim

John "Memphis Slim" Chatman was a blues music pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump-blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano....
 (blues); the Stony Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger

Peter "Pete" Seeger is an United States folk singer, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 50s as a member of The Weavers, most notably the 1950 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight, Irene" that topped the charts f...
, Mike Seeger
Mike Seeger

Mike Seeger is an United States folk music and folklorist.He was exposed to traditional music through his mother and father , who worked with Musicology John Lomax and Alan Lomax....
 (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs
The Cadillacs

The Cadillacs were an United States rock and roll and doo-wop group from Harlem, New York; active from 1953 to 1962. The group was noted for their 1955 chart-topper "Speedoo," which was instrumental in attracting White people audiences to African American rock and roll performers....
 (a rock and roll group). The occasion marked the first time rock and roll and bluegrass were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs," Lomax told the audience. According to Izzy Young
Izzy Young

Israel Goodman Young or Izzy Young is a noted figure in the world of folk music, both in United States and Sweden.He is the former owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, and since 1973, he has owned and operated the Folklore Centrum store in Stockholm....
, the audience booed when he told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll. In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music . . . . At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing."

Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Harold in February 1937. They were married for 12 years. She assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi, and who wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music, broadcast over the BBC as part of the war effort, as well as conducting lengthy interviews with folk music personalities. He also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an United States folkloristics and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God....
 in Florida and the Bahamas; with John Work and Lewis Jones in Mississippi; with folksingers Robin Roberts and Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie

Jean Ritchie is an United States folk music singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player....
 in Ireland; with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean; with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter, Anna L. Chairetakis. All those who assisted and worked with him were accurately credited on the resultant Library of Congress and other recordings, as well as in his many books and publications.

Alan Lomax met twenty-year-old English folk singer Shirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained a contract from Atlantic Records to re-record some the U.S. artists he had recorded in the 1940s, using improved recording equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle
Almeda Riddle

Almeda Riddle was an American folk singer.Born and raised in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she learned music from her father, a fiddler and singing teacher....
, Hobart Smith
Hobart Smith

Hobart Smith was an USA old-time music musician. He was most notable for his appearance with his sister, Texas Gladden, on a series of Library of Congress recordings in the 1940s and his later appearances at various festivals during the American folk music revival of the 1960s....
, and Bessie Jones
Bessie Jones

Bessie Jones , gospel singer from the Georgia Sea Islands. She learned her songs from her grandfather, a former slave born in Africa. She was a founding member of the Georgia Sea Island Singers....
 and culminated in the discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell
Fred McDowell

Fred McDowell , often known as Mississippi Fred McDowell, was a blues singer and guitar player in the Delta blues style....
. Recordings from this trip were issued under the title Sounds of the South and some were also featured in the Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. Lomax wanted to marry her but when their trip was over, Collins returned to England and instead married Austin John Marshall. In an interview in , Collins was miffed that Alan Lomax's 1993 history of blues music, The Land Where The Blues Began, barely mentioned her. "All it said was, 'Shirley Collins was along for the trip'. It made me hopping mad. I wasn't just 'along for the trip'. I was part of the recording process, I made notes, I drafted contracts, I was involved in every part". Collins decided to rectify the perceived omission in her memoir America Over the Water, published in 2004.

Collins described her arrival in America 1959 in an interview with Johan Kugelberg :
Kugelberg: Lomax met you?
Collins: He was on the dockside with Anne, his daughter. . . .. I think I arrived in April and I don't think we went south until August. It took quite a long time to get the money together; it kept falling through. I think Columbia was going to pay for it at one point, but they insisted he have a union engineer with him and someone extra like that -- that in situations we were going to be in would have been hopeless. So he refused, and they withdrew their funding. It was very last minute that the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic gave us the cash and we were gone within days of getting that money. Alan had wanted to do it earlier, but there was just no money to do it with. He had no money, ever. He was always living hand to mouth.
Kugelberg: That's the nature of somebody who is making the path as he's going along. Also as a sidebar, considering who the Ertegun brothers were at that point in time, it's surprising to me that they greenlighted that project at that point in time. I love that series, I think it's one of the great series of albums ever. It's surprising that Atlantic Records made that leap of faith because the series is sort of outside of their paradigm. So, those months were spent in New York?
Collins: We went to another place actually, we went to California, to the California Folk festival in Berkeley, this was sometime in the summer. And we stopped off in Chicago and stayed with [Studs Terkel] who was a hospitable man and his wonderful hospitable wife. Caught the train out to San Francisco from Chicago, which was an incredible experience. Sang at the Berkeley festival and met Jimmy Driftwood there for the first time. We all hit it off wonderfully.
Kugelberg: Your friends in England were dying of envy.
Collins: No, they didn't know.


Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961.

In 1962, Lomax and singer and Civil Rights Activist Guy Carawan
Guy Carawan

Guy Carawan is an American folk music musician, and Music Director and Song Leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee....
, music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album, Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961-62, on Vanguard Records for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record
Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Record is a phonograph record included in the two Voyager program spacecraft launched in 1977. It contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth....
 sent into space on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth. Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson
Blind Willie Johnson

"Blind" Willie Johnson was an United States singer and guitarist whose music straddled the border between blues music and spirituals. While the lyrics of all of his songs were religious, his music drew from both sacred and blues traditions....
, Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong

Louis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer.Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an innovative cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence on jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performers....
, and Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry

Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter.Chuck Berry is an influential figure and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music....
; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; a Sicilian sulfur miner’s lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti
Mbuti

The Bambuti people, or Mbuti as they are collectively called, are one of several Indigenous peoples of Africa hunter-gatherer groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo region of Africa....
 Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska
Valya Balkanska

Valya Mladenova Balkanska is a Bulgarian folk music singer from the Rhodope Mountains known for singing the song Izlel e Delyu Haydutin, part of the Voyager Golden Record selection of music included in the two Voyager program spacecraft launched in 1977....
; in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more.

International Music

Musician Brian Eno
Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno , is an England musician, composer, record producer, music theory and singer, who, as a solo artist, is best known as the People known as the father or mother of something of ambient music....
 had this to say about Lomax's later career:
[He later ] turned his intelligent attentions to music from many other parts of the world, securing for them a dignity and status they had not previously been accorded. The “World Music” phenomenon arose partly from those efforts, as did his great book, Folk Song Style and Culture. I believe this is one of the most important books ever written about music, in my all time top ten. It is one of the very rare attempts to put cultural criticism onto a serious, comprehensible, and rational footing by someone who had the experience and breadth of vision to be able to do it.”


Cultural Equity

As a member of the Popular Front
Popular front

A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of Left-wing politics and Centrism who are united by opposition to another group ....
 and People's Songs
People's Songs

People's Songs was an organization founded by Pete Seeger on December 31, 1945, in New York City, to "create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the United States people." The organization published a quarterly newsletter magazine from 1946 through 1950, it collected stories, songs and writings of People's singers members....
 in the 1940s, Alan Lomax promoted what was then known as "One World" and today is called multiculturalism. In the late forties he produced a series of concerts at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall that presented Flamenco guitar and Calypso, along with country blues, Appalachian music, Andean music, and jazz. His radio shows of the 40s and 50s explored musics of all the world's peoples.

Lomax recognized that folklore (like all forms of creativity) occurs at the local and not the national level and flourishes not in isolation but in fruitful interplay with other cultures. He was dismayed that mass communications appeared to be crushing local cultural expressions and languages. In 1950 he echoed anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski
Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski was a Poles anthropology widely considered to be one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century because of his pioneering work on ethnography fieldwork, with which he also gave a major contribution to the study of Melanesia, and the study of Reciprocity ....
, who believed the role of the ethnologist should be that of advocate for primitive man, when he urged folklorists to similarly advocate for the folk. Some, such as Richard Dorson
Richard Dorson

Richard Mercer Dorson was an United States folkloristics, author, professor, and director of the Folklore Institute at at Indiana University. He earned his Ph.D....
, objected that scholars shouldn't act as cultural arbiters, but Lomax believed it would be unethical to stand idly by as the magnificent variety of the world's cultures and languages was "grayed out" by centralized commercial entertainment and educational systems. Although he acknowledged potential problems with intervention, he urged that folklorists with their special training actively assist communities in safeguarding and revitalizing their own local traditions.

Similar ideas had been put into practice by Benjamin Botkin, Harold W. Thompson, and Louis C. Jones, who believed that folklore studied by folklorists should be returned to its home communities to enable it to thrive anew. They have been realized in the annual (since 1967) Smithsonian Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (for which Lomax served as a consultant), in national and regional initiatives by public folklorists and local activists in helping communities gain recognition for their oral traditions and lifeways both in their home communities and in the world at large; and in the National Heritage Awards, concerts, and fellowships given by the NEA and various State governments to master folk and traditional artists.

In 2001, in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington of Sept. 11, UNESCO's declared the safeguarding of languages and intangible culture on a par with protection of individual human rights and as essential for human survival as biodiversity is for nature, ideas first articulated by Alan Lomax.

Red Baiting

From 1942 to 1979 Lomax was investigated and repeatedly interviewed by the FBI, although nothing incriminating was ever found and the investigation was eventually abandoned. Scholar and jazz pianist Ted Gioia
Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a noted jazz critic and music historian, best known for his books The History of Jazz and Delta Blues, both selected as notable books of the year by The New York Times....
 uncovered and published extracts from Alan Lomax's 800-page FBI files. The investigation appears to have started when an anonymous informant reported overhearing Lomax's father telling guests in 1941 about his son's Communist sympathies. Looking for leads, the FBI seized on the fact that, as a teenager, Lomax had transferred from Harvard to the University of Texas after being arrested in Boston in connection with a political demonstration. In 1942 the FBI bizarrely sent agents to interview students at Harvard's freshman dorm about Lomax's participation in a demonstration that had occurred there ten years earlier (in 1932) in support of one Edith Berkman, viewed by the FBI as a "communist agitator" and threatened with deportation. Lomax had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined $25.00. Miss Berkman, however, had been cleared of accusations against her and was not deported. Nor had Lomax's academic record been affected in any way. Nevertheless, the bureau continued to try to show that in 1932 Lomax had either distributed Communist literature or made public speeches in support of the Communist Party.

According to Ted Gioia:
Lomax must have felt it necessary to address the suspicions. He gave a sworn statement to an FBI agent on April 3, 1942, denying both of these charges. He also explained his arrest while at Harvard as the result of police overreaction. He was, he claimed, 15 at the time – he was actually 17 and a college student – and he said he had intended to participate in a peaceful demonstration. Lomax said he and his colleagues agreed to stop their protest when police asked them to, but that he was grabbed by a couple of policemen as he was walking away. "That is pretty much the story there, except that it distressed my father very, very much," Lomax told the FBI. "'I had to defend my righteous position, and he couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand him. It has made a lot of unhappiness for the two of us because he loved Harvard and wanted me to be a great success there.' Lomax transferred to the University of Texas the following year".
Lomax left Harvard after a year because his father lost his job and all his money during the depression and could no longer afford to send him there and not for any political or academic reasons. He probably also had wanted to be close to his newly bereaved father, now a widower.

In June 1942 the FBI approached the Librarian of Congress, Archibald McLeish, attempting to have Lomax fired as Assistant in Charge of the Library's Archive of American Folk Song. At the time, Lomax was preparing for a field trip to the Mississippi Delta on behalf of the Library, where he would make landmark recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, among others. McLeish wrote to Hoover defending Lomax: "I have studied the findings of these reports very carefully. I do not find positive evidence that Mr. Lomax has been engaged in subversive activities and I am therefore taking no disciplinary action toward him." Nevertheless, according to Gioia:
Yet what the probe failed to find in terms of prosecutable evidence, it made up for in speculation about his character. An FBI report dated July 23, 1943, describes Lomax as possessing “an erratic, artistic temperament” and a “bohemian attitude.” It says: “He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results." The file quotes one informant who said that “Lomax was a very peculiar individual, that he seemed to be very absent-minded and that he paid practically no attention to his personal appearance.” This same source adds that he suspected Lomax’s peculiarity and poor grooming habits came from associating with the hillbillies who provided him with folk tunes".


Lomax, who was a founding member of People's Songs
People's Songs

People's Songs was an organization founded by Pete Seeger on December 31, 1945, in New York City, to "create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the United States people." The organization published a quarterly newsletter magazine from 1946 through 1950, it collected stories, songs and writings of People's singers members....
, was in charge of campaign music for Henry A. Wallace's 1948 Presidential run on the Progressive Party ticket on a platform opposing the arms race and supporting civil rights for Jews and African Americans. Subsequently, Lomax was one of the performers listed in Red Channels as a possible Communist sympathizer and was consequently blacklisted from working in US entertainment industries.

A 2007 revealed that in the early '50s, the British MI5
MI5

The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of the intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service , Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence Staff ....
 placed Alan Lomax under surveillance as a suspected Communist. Its report concluded that although Lomax undoubtedly held "left wing" views, there was no evidence he was a Communist. Released Sept. 4, 2007 (File ref KV 2/2701), a summary of his MI5 file reads as follows:
Noted American folk music archivist and collector Alan Lomax first attracted the attention of the Security Service when it was noted that he had made contact with the Romanian press attaché in London while he was working on a series of folk music broadcasts for the BBC in 1952. Correspondence ensued with the American authorities as to Lomax' suspected membership of the Communist Party, though no positive proof is found on this file. The Service took the view that Lomax' work compiling his collections of world folk music gave him a legitimate reason to contact the attaché, and that while his views (as demonstrated by his choice of songs and singers) were undoubtedly left wing, there was no need for any specific action against him.
The file contains a partial record of Lomax' movements, contacts and activities while in Britain, and includes for example a police report of the "Songs of the Iron Road" concert at St Pancras in December 1953. His association with film director Joseph Losey is also mentioned (serial 30a).


The FBI again investigated Lomax in 1956 and sent a 68 page report to the CIA and the Attorney General's office. However, William Tompkins, assistant attorney general, wrote to Hoover that the investigation had failed to disclose sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution or the suspension of Lomax's passport.

Then, as late as 1979, an FBI report suggested that Lomax had recently impersonated an FBI agent. The report appears to have been based on mistaken identity. The person who reported the incident to the FBI said that the man in question was around 43, about 5 feet 9 inches and 190 pounds. The FBI file notes that Lomax stood 6 feet tall, weighed 240 pounds and was 64 at the time:
Lomax resisted the FBI’s attempts to interview him about the impersonation charges, but he finally met with agents at his home in November 1979. He denied that he’d been involved in the matter but did note that he’d been in New Hampshire in July 1979, visiting a film editor about a documentary. The FBI’s report concluded that “Lomax made no secret of the fact that he disliked the FBI and disliked being interviewed by the FBI. Lomax was extremely nervous throughout the interview".
The FBI investigation was concluded the following year, shortly after Lomax's 65th birthday.

Awards

Alan Lomax received the National Medal of Arts
National Medal of Arts

The National Medal of Arts is an award and title created by the Congress of the United States in 1984, for the purpose of honoring artists and patrons of the arts....
 from President Reagan in 1986, a Library of Congress Living Legend Award in 2000, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from Tulane University in 2001 . He won the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English language....
 and the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1993 for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, connecting the story of the origins of Blues music with the prevalence of forced labor in the pre-World War II South (especially on the Mississippi levees). Lomax also received a posthumous Grammy Trustees Award
Grammy Trustees Award

The Grammy Award Trustees Award is awarded by the Recording Academy to "individuals who, during their careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording" ....
 for his lifetime achievements in 2003. Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax (Rounder Records, 8 CDs boxed set) won in two categories at the 48th annual Grammy Awards ceremony held on Feb 8, 2006

Trivia

  • The famous "Hoedown" in Aaron Copland
    Aaron Copland

    Aaron Copland was an American classical music composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as "the dean of American composers." Copland's music achieved a balance between modernism music and American folk styles....
    's 1942 ballet Rodeo
    Rodeo (Copland)

    Rodeo is a ballet score written by Aaron Copland in 1942. The ballet consists of five sections: "Buckaroo Holiday", "Ranch House Party", "Corral Nocturne", "Saturday Night Waltz", and "Hoe-Down"....
     was taken note for note from Ruth Crawford Seeger
    Ruth Crawford Seeger

    Ruth Crawford Seeger , born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist....
    's 1941 piano transcription of the square-dance tune, "Bonypart" ("Bonaparte's Retreat"), taken from a recording of W. M. Stepp's fiddle version, originally recorded in Appalachia for the Library of Congress by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in 1937. Seeger's transcription was published in Our Singing Country by John A. and Alan Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger.
  • Miles Davis
    Miles Davis

    Miles Dewey Davis III was an United States jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer.Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Davis was at the forefront of almost every major development in jazz from World War II to the 1990s: he played on various early bebop records and recorded one of the first cool jaz...
    's 1959 album adapts the melodies "Alborada de vigo" and "Saeta" from Alan Lomax's Columbia World Library album Spain.
  • A character named Alan Lomax was featured in the book Ishmael
    Ishmael (novel)

    Ishmael is a 1992 novel by Daniel Quinn. It examines mythology, its effect on Ethics , and how that relates to sustainability. The novel uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion of human supremacy, or that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution, as a cultural myth, and asserts that modern civi...
     by Daniel Quinn
    Daniel Quinn

    Daniel Quinn is a American environmentalist writer. He is best known for his book Ishmael , which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991....
    .
  • BBC Radio 4
    BBC Radio 4

    BBC Radio 4 is a domestic UK radio station that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history....
     aired a program on Saturday June 7 2008 in their Archive Hour strand narrated by Marybeth Hamilton on the sessions between Alan Lomax and Jelly Roll Morton
    Jelly Roll Morton

    Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was an United States ragtime pianist, bandleader and composer.Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton claimed, in self-promotional hyperbole, to have invented jazz outright in 1902....
     in 1938 called "The Dreamtime of Jazz."
  • In June 2008, PBS's magazine announced the debut of the kid's show, Lomax: The Hound of Music (produced by: Sirius Thinking, Ltd., Executive Producers: Christopher Cerf, Norman Stiles, Richard Fernandes, and Richard Moore), on Connecticut Public Television. The show, aimed at an audience of children aged 3-7 years, features Lomax the dog and his sidekick Delta the cat (both puppets), along with their human companion Amy. They take a train ride across the country to discover the history of American roots music. Along the way they meet musical celebrities and learn tunes such as “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and “The Gooney Bird Song”. Arguably, these are humorous camp songs rather than folk or "roots" music. Alan Lomax's own functioning music education prototype: , based on his Cantometrics research and intended as "an egalitarian showcase for the expressive arts and aesthetic values of all cultures", remains unfunded.
  • Moby
    Moby

    Richard Melville Hall , better known by his stage name Moby is an American DJ, singer-songwriter and musician.He plays keyboard, guitar, bass guitar and drums....
    's album Play sampled several songs from Lomax's 1993 Atlantic recording Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey From the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta, including "Natural Blues" ("Trouble So Hard").


Bibliography

A partial list of books by Alan Lomax includes:

  • Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997. Ronald D. Cohen, Editor (includes a chapter defining all the categories of cantometrics). New York: Routledge: 2003.


  • Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean Compiler, with J. D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawes. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997 (Cloth, ISBN 0679404538); New York: Random House, 1998 (Cloth).


  • The Land Where The Blues Began. New York: Pantheon, 1993.


  • Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music: Audiocassettes and a Handbook. Berkeley: University of California Media Extension Center, 1976.


  • Folk Song Style and Culture. With contributions by Conrad Arensberg, Edwin E. Erickson, Victor Grauer, Norman Berkowitz, Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay, Joan Halifax, Barbara Ayres, Norman N. Markel, Roswell Rudd, Monika Vizedom, Fred Peng, Roger Wescott, David Brown. Washington, D.C.: Colonial Press Inc, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Publication no. 88, 1968.


  • Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (1968)


  • 3000 Years of Black Poetry. Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul, Editors. New York: Dodd Mead Company, 1969. Paperback edition, Fawcett Publications, 1971.


  • The Leadbelly Songbook. Moses Asch and Alan Lomax, Editors. Musical transcriptions by Jerry Silverman. Forward by Moses Asch. New York: Oak Publications, 1962.


  • Folk Songs of North America. Melodies and guitar chords transcribed by Peggy Seeger. New York: Doubleday, 1960.


  • The Rainbow Sign'. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1959.


  • Leadbelly: A Collection of World Famous Songs by Huddie Ledbetter. Edited with John A. Lomax. Hally Wood, Music Editor. Special note on Leadbelly’s 12-string guitar by Pete Seeger. New York: Folkways Music Publishers Company, 1959.


  • Harriet and Her Harmonium: An American adventure with thirteen folk songs from the Lomax collection. Illustrated by Pearl Binder. Music arranged by Robert Gill. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1955.


  • Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz". Drawings by David Stone Martin. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1950.


  • Folk Song: USA. With John A. Lomax. Piano accompaniment by Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, c.1947. Republished as Best Loved American Folk Songs, New York: Grosset and Dunlap 1947 (Cloth).


  • Freedom Songs of the United Nations. With Svatava Jakobson. Washington, D.C.: Office of War Information, 1943.


  • Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. With John A. Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: MacMillan, 1941.


  • Check-list of Recorded Songs in the English Language in the Archive of American Folk Song in July 1940. Washington, D.C.: Music Division, Library of Congress, 1942. Three volumes.


  • American Folksong and Folklore: A Regional Bibliography. With Sidney Robertson Cowell. New York, Progressive Education Association, 1942. Reprint, Temecula, CA: Reprint Services Corp., 1988 (62 pp. ISBN 0781207673).


  • Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly. With John A. Lomax. New York: Macmillan, 1936.
See also:


DVDs

  • Lomax the Songhunter
    Lomax the Songhunter

    Lomax the Songhunter is a 2004 documentary film about Alan Lomax, a man who, after World War II, was determined to record United States folk music before it was blown away by mass consumer culture....
    , documentary directed by Rogier Kappers, 2004 (issued on DVD 2007).


See also

  • John Avery Lomax


External links

  • - Alan Lomax pages
  • .
  • - Appalachian Journey, Cajun Country, Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old, Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now, The Land Where the Blues Began
  • from P.O.V.
    P.O.V.

    P.O.V. is a Public Broadcasting Service television series which features independent nonfiction films.P.O.V. is the longest-running showcase on television for independent documentary films....
     August 22, 2006. Discussion guide, streaming radio sampler, discussion board.
  • Scene taken from , a musical documentary that travels the world to meet people whom Lomax recorded and portrays his life through interviews with relatives.
  • (1947), documentary film written by Alan Lomax, narrated by Pete Seeger, with Texas Gladden, Woody Guthrie, Baldwin Hawes, Cisco Houston, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, and the Margot Mayo Square Dancers on Google video
  • by Alan Lomax and Peter Kennedy, a filmed documentary of the Padstow May Day Ceremony (1951) at Documentary Educational Resources.