Alan Lomax

Lomax playing guitar on stage at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina, sometime between 1939 and 1950.

Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American folklorist, musicologist, author, and producer, and one of the most important field collectors of folk music of the twentieth century. Lomax recorded thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, the West Indies, Italy, and Spain. His field trips into the American South in the thirties and forties played a seminal role in the emergence of the blues and African American folk music in the global marketplace. Lomax discovered such influential artists as the then-unknown McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), Huddie Leadbetter (Leadbelly), and Woody Guthrie. In his field work he preserved both the performances and narrative histories of styles that, in popularized form, would come to dominate popular music in later decades.

Lomax was a long-time advocate for the civil rights and cultural recognition of African Americans, organizing entertainment for the Poor People's March on Washington in 1968 and some years earlier co-producing the album Freedom in the Air, documenting the Albany, Georgia, civil rights movement. Lomax's his research into folk music roots, systematized in a discipline he call Cantometrics, laid the groundwork for the emergence of world music as a popular genre.

Lomax served as consultant to Carl Sagan for the audio collection included in the 1977 Voyager space probe, ensuring that the world’s music heritage, from anguished blues to orchestral masterworks, would serve as an eloquent emissary of human civilization to remote space.

Alan Lomax received the National Medal of Arts from U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Biography

Alan Lomax was born in Austin, Texas, the son John Lomax, an English professor with a then-unorthodox interest in indigenous folk music of the South. The elder Lomax was the author of the best-selling Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) and discovered and recorded the now-standard "Home on the Range" in early field work. He also had a particular fascination with the varied music traditions of rural southern blacks. For both father and son, the blues, field hollers, and prison work songs of the South were aesthetically satisfying and worthy of study. The music emerged from the era of slavery and retained vestiges of African origins in its rhythms and timbre, giving plaintive expression to experiences of oppression, cultural dislocation, and anomie.

In the summer of 1933, the elder Lomax was commissioned by the Library of Congress to document southern black folk music traditions for the library’s Archive of American Folk Music, and seventeen-year-old Lomax joined his father (and later the black writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston) to record the laborers, church congregants, prison inmates, and itinerant musicians in the Deep South. They eventually gathering thousands of field recordings throughout the United States, as well as in Haiti and the Bahamas.

Demonstrating serious interest and respect for the music of blacks in the 1930s was not only exceptional but dangerous. In the South, custom dictated demeaning racial subservience of blacks toward whites, and shaking hands or socializing between whites and blacks was forbidden. Despite threats of violence and imprisonment, Lomax penetrated into the world of the southern black, winning trust across volatile racial fault lines in a precarious balancing act . Technological challenges added to the ordeal, as the researchers had to haul a large, cumbersome recording apparatus, which further broadcast the peculiar endeavor to suspicious white southerners.

The technology of recording was still relatively new. Experimental recordings of folk music had been made as early as the 1890s, but advances by the 1930s brought superior sound fidelity than earlier efforts. Prior attempts to document southern black music, moreover, were limited to formal notations based on the European classical model, which was inadequate to render the unconventional tempos and blue notes of the folk performances.

Among the legendary encounters in Lomax's early field work was the discovery of the intinerant musician Huddie Ledbetter, known familiarly as Leadbelly, in Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, serving time for manslaughter. The Lomaxes came to regard Ledbetter as the greatest single repository of American folk songs, including standards like "Goodnight Irene", The Rock Island Line, and The Midnight Special. Anxious for clemency, Leadbelly famously recorded for an appeal for pardon which the Lomaxes took to the governor's mansion. Whether throught the appeal of his song or other reasons the singer was release a few months later and went north with the Lomaxes.

In 1937 Lomax was appointed as head of the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folk Song, and in 1939, while doing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University, he produced the first of several radio series for CBS, which introduced regional American fok artists like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger to national audiences. Lomax published books and produced records, broadcasts, and concert series that introduced blues, flamenco, calypso, and southern folk music, all still relatively unknown genres. “The main point of my activity,” Lomax once remarked, “was... to put sound technology at the disposal of The Folk, to bring channels of communication to all sorts of artists and areas.”

In 1940 Lomax recorded a series of interviews and solo performances with the pinoeering New Orleans jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who had fallen into obscurity in Washington, DC. The interview provided a nearly unique examination of the emergence of jazz (Morton claimed to have intented it) in turn-of-the-century New Orleans and was published to critical acclaim as Mister Jelly Roll (1950). Lomax's subsequent recordings with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie captured not only the music but the lives, personalities, and times of these celebrated folk artists. Lomax's 1947 interview and performance session with blues legends Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson, Blues in the Mississippi Night, was reissued by Rounder Records in 2002.

In 1950, Lomax left the United States to avoid being targeted for his left of center political views during the McCarthy era. He lived in England, studying British folk music under a Guggenheim fellowship but did field recordings throughout Europe. His survey of Italian folk music with Diego Carpitella, conducted in 1953 and 1954, helped capture 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 evolved in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.

His recordings in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Italy were edited and produced for an eighteen-volume anthology of world folk music for Columbia Records (predating a UNESCO world music series by several years). These recordings, broadcast through BBC radio and television, introduced listeners to British and world folk music and laid the foundations for folk music revivals in those countries.

Returning to the United States in 1958, Lomax took two extended field trips through the South, and in 1962 he made field recordings of music, interviews, and story-songs in the Eastern Caribbean. In 1960 Lomax published the groundbreaking Folk Songs of North America (Doubleday), which underscored his interest in the relationship of folk song style and culture.

Documenting correspondences between music and culture became Lomax's life work from this time. He settled in New York and from 1962 until 1989 he founded and then directed the Cantometrics and Choreometrics projects at Columbia University. He then moved to Hunter College where he founded and directed the Association for Cultural Equity (AEC) until 1996. Lomax's Global Jukebox project.]

Recognition

Lomax's pioneering field work won him greater visibility in his later life. In 1986 he received the National Medal of the Arts from President Reagan at a White House ceremony. In 1990 he produced the five-part American Patchwork series aired on PBS, and in 1993 he published the autobiographical book, The Land Where the Blues Began, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. In 1997, Rounder Records began the monumental project of digitally remastering and reissuing Lomax's historic field recordings. The Alan Lomax Collection features a projected 150 titles drawn from the archives at AEC. Lomax also received a posthumous Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 2003.

In March 2004, the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress acquired the entire Alan Lomax Collection housed at Hunter College, including more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 scholarly books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, manuscripts correspondence, fieldnotes, research files, program scripts, and indexes, comprising an "unparalleled ethnographic documentation collected by the legendary folklorist over a period of sixty years," according to the library's American Folklife Center.

"The Alan Lomax Collection contains pioneering documentation of traditional music, dance, tales, and other forms of grassroots creativity in the United States and abroad," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "We are extremely pleased that this collection has come to our American national library, where its creator did such important work in the 1930s."

Legacy

Alan Lomax is among the most influential pioneers of cross-cultural understanding in twentieth century. His early field work led to the discovery of artists like Muddy Waters, who would play a large part in the emergence of rhythm and blues and rock and roll; and Woodie Guthrie, who would greatly influence the career of Bob Dylan and inspire the folk revival of the 1960s. His recordings of the legendary blues pioneer Son House and discovery and recording of Fred McDowell in a 1959 field trip remain milestones in the emergence of the blues as a popular music genre.

Lomax's singular dedication to understanding culture through indigenous music His recording, interviews, films, and writings have permanently changed the world cultural landscape, enabling formerly invisible cultures to express their experience through art in the global culture. "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."

Achievements

Lomax won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the in 1993 for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, the story of the origins of Blues music.

Bibliography

• Selected Writings 1934-1997 (2003) (This includes a chapter defining all the categories of cantometrics.)
• The Land Where The Blues Began (1993)
• Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" (1973)
• Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (edited with John Lomax, re-printed 2000)
• Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (1968)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• "Lomax, Alan" obituary in Current Biography, 2002.
• Alan Lomax: Mirades Miradas Glances Photos by Alan Lomax, ed. by Antoni Pizà (Barcelona: Lunwerg / Fundacio Sa Nostra, 2006) ISBN 84-9785-271-0

See also

• John Lomax III

External links

• Alan Lomax Collection, The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
  • Lomax Collection images, Library of Congress
• Alan Lomax archive
• Alan Lomax complete discography from Music City
• Alan Lomax films for viewing online - 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
• Lomax: the songhunter from P.O.V. August 22, 2006. Discussion guide, streaming radio sampler, discussion board.
• The documentary Lomax the songhunter is available for viewing DocsOnline: search title and type Lomax. Preview

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