Alan Lomax was one of the foremost musicologists of the 20th century, a man who spent his life writing about and recording folk music from around the world. “As a people live,” he has said, “So do they sing.” Lomax was born on January 15, 1915, in Austin, Texas. His father, John A. Lomax, was a folklorist and collector of songs, who, in 1934, became the head of the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Music.
Alan Lomax attended Harvard University (1932–33) and later studied anthropology at Columbia University. He was an assistant archivist at the Library of Congress from 1937 to 1942. He first accompanied his father on a recording trip in 1933- They travelled throughout the South with a 500-pound Edison cylinder recording machine and recorded local musicians singing and playing folk songs. Arguably their most important “find” was the folk/blues singer and guitarist LEADBELLY, whom they recorded in the unlikely surroundings of a Louisiana prison. By 1941, the Lomaxes had contributed more than 10,000 songs to the Library of Congress archives.
Alan Lomax had his hand in every aspect of folk music. In 1939, he produced a folk-music series for CBS radio. Later, he worked with the Scottish folksinger and composer Ewan MacColl on a U.K. radio program, Ballads and Blues. He was Director of Folk Music for Decca Records from 1946 to 1949, and made many historically significant recordings. These included interviews and performances by pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” MORTON, one of the creators of jazz, in 1938, and by blues musicians Son HOUSE and McKinley Morganfield, who later took the name Muddy WATERS, in 1941 and 1942. Most of the thousands of people whom he recorded, however, were true folk musicians—obscure singers and instrumentalists who had never recorded before and would never record again. “I found out that what I was really doing was giving an avenue for those people to express themselves and to tell their side of the story,” Lomax said.
Lomax’s work took him to the Caribbean, U.K., and European mainland, but he is best known for his work in the U.S. He returned repeatedly to the South, where he recorded spirituals, work songs, shouts and ballads, despite being humiliated, shot at, and harassed for wanting to work with African-American musicians. In 1935, Lomax and author-folklorist Zora Neale Hurston recorded the oral histories of blacks on the Georgia Sea Islands and in Florida.
In the early 1940s, Lomax discovered what he called “the main find of my whole career”—Sid Hemphill, a multi-instrumentalist playing a deeply African proto-blues with his fife-and-drum dance band in the hills of northern Mississippi. He recorded Hemphill again and discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell, among others, in the summer of 1959.
In addition to being a researcher, Lomax produced folk music broadcasts, concerts, and recitals, and was a consultant for folk festivals, including the Newport Folk Festival. Lomax also wrote several books, including Mister Jelly Roll and The Folk Songs of North America. From the 1960s, he analysed folk music from more than 600 cultures around the world in a system called “Cantometrics,” which attempted to classify elements of folk music so that comparisons could be made across cultures. (The product of this analysis, which to date has not been completed, will be a multimedia database of world song and dance styles.)
In 1997 Rounder Records, in conjunction with the Lomax Archive at New York’s Hunter College, released the first of what will be by the year 2001 a 100-CD set compiled from his field recordings.
Stan Hieronymus
SEE ALSO:
FESTIVALS AND EVENTS; FOLK MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Lomax, Alan. Folk Song Style and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
The Lomax Collection (100-CD set, released individually from 1997–2001); Sounds of the South.