Alan
Lomax (January
31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral
historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced recordings, concerts, and radio
shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British
folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. During the New Deal, with his father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded
thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum
and acetate discs.
After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of
Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect
independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as
the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling a treasure
trove of American and international culture. With the start of the Cold War,
Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned
inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he
called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical
foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype
Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and
80s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about
folk music, American Patchwork,
which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a
long-deferred memoir, The Land
Where the Blues Began (1995),
linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor
in the American South.
Between August 1959 and
May 1960, folklorist Alan Lomax took a trip through the American South—dubbed
“The Southern Journey”— to record the little-known southern backcountry and
blues music that we consider uniquely American. While traveling through
Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia,
Lomax’s camera was a constant companion. These photographs, part of the vast
collections of the Library of Congress, show musicians making music with family
and friends at home, with fellow worshippers at church, and alongside workers
and prisoners in the fields. The photographs, along with the rest of the
material from the trip, now reside in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/publish/general/alan-lomax.html
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