ALAN LOMAX | PHOTOGRAPHER

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. wikipedia

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. Fonte

loc.gov

All images  ©  Alan Lomax