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, recording 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 performance and narrative history of styles that, in popularized form, would come to dominate popular music in later decaqdes.

Lomax was a tireless advocate for the civil rights and cultural recognition of African Americans, and 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 earth to remote stars.

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 first 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 to 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 in a precarious balancing act of winning trust across volatile racial fault lines. 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 promised far superior 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 poorly suited to render the unconventional tempos and blue notes of the rustic folk performances.

Among the legendary encounters in Lomax's early field work was the discovery of the interanant musician Huddie Ledbetter, known familiarly as Leadbelly, in Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, serving time for manslaughter. Ledbetter was a treasure trove of every kind of folk song from the South, including the standard, "Goodnight Irene." Anxious for clemency, Leadbelly recorded for an appeal for pardon which the Lomaxes "took to the governor's mansion on one hot August day, left it with his board clerk, and suddenly, magically, a few months later, Lead Belly was out of the pen."

In 1937 Lomax was appointed as the director of the 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.”[1]

In 1940 Lomax recorded a series of interviews and performances with the pinoeering New Orleans jazz musician 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. 

His survey of Italian folk music with Diego Carpitella, conducted in 1953 and 1954, 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 emerge in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.

In 1944 Alan Lomax took part in a Ballad opera called "The Martins and the Coys." It was recorded by the BBC and CBS and features contributions by Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. It was released on Rounder Records in 2000.

Achievements

Lomax won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1993 for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, the story of the origins of Blues music. Lomax also received a posthumous Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 2003.

Trivia

• A character named Alan Lomax was featured in the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
• Lomax's works and collected songs are heavily sampled on Moby's breakthrough album, Play.
• In 2006 the scholar and jazz pianist Ted Gioia uncovered and published extracts from Alan Lomax's FBI files. Lomax was repeatedly investigated by the FBI but never found guilty of anything.[1]
• Alan Lomax was put under surveillance by MI5 as a potential communist, and his BBC TV shows in the early 1950s were monitored by Special Branch.

Bibliography

His books include

• 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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