Alan Lomax

• Born: January 15, 1915
• Birthplace: Austin, Texas
• Died: July 19, 2002
• Place of death: Safety Harbor, Florida

American musicologist, producer, and author

A driving force in the folk and blues boom of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Lomax discovered such artists as Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, and Muddy Waters. By recording them, he preserved folk songs from England, Scotland, Ireland, the Caribbean, Spain, Italy, and the United States.

The Life

Alan Lomax (LOH-max) was the son of John Avery Lomax, a onetime banker who became a preeminent collector of cowboy songs and Southwestern American folklore, and Bess Baumann Brown. Growing up in Texas, Lomax listened to the songs in his father’s collection, he became an advocate of America’s folk-music traditions. Lomax often acted as his father’s assistant. Subsequently, the Lomax family moved to Washington, D.C., so Lomax’s father could work full time for the Library of Congress. With his father, Lomax began collecting folk music for the Library of Congress, lugging a five-hundred-pound recording machine through the South and West, as they collected the songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners, and others who were rarely heard. Lomax attended Choate and spent a year at Harvard, but he left in 1933 to enroll at the University of Texas, from which he graduated in 1936. Later, he did graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University.

Lomax was appointed to head the Archive of American Folk Song (now the American Folklife Center), which he and his father helped establish at the Library of Congress. He married Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold in February, 1937, and they went to Haiti for their honeymoon to do field research; they soon had a daughter. Later that year, he joined his father, who was an honorary curator for the Library of Congress, as the first federally funded employee of that government office. In 1939 Lomax began a weekly radio program on CBS Radio, American School of the Air, and then he was given a network program, Back Where I Come From. In 1948 he was the host of On Top of Old Smokey, a radio show on the Mutual Broadcasting System.

In the early 1940’s, Lomax made extensive recordings of songs and stories by Woody Guthrie, both for the Library of Congress and for commercial release on RCA Victor as Dust Bowl Ballads. In 1941 he made the first recordings of McKinley Morganfield, a cotton picker and blues singer better known by his nickname, Muddy Waters.

After leaving the Library of Congress, Lomax continued his career as a musicologist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host. He made films about dance with Forrestine Paulay, a movement analyst, in the 1970’s. He wrote, directed, and produced a documentary, The Land Where the Blues Began, in 1985, and he wrote, directed, narrated, and produced American Patchwork, a series of programs on American traditions shown on public television in the early 1990’s. For such efforts, he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts.

In the 1990’s, he started work on the vast Alan Lomax Collection, which presented songs that he collected throughout his entire career, with Rounder Records. He traveled globally, making documentary recordings, and he founded the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College in New York City, now directed by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood. In 1986 he received the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1993 he received the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction for his book, The Land Where the Blues Began.

He married his second wife, Antoinette Marchand, in 1961. After suffering a massive stroke in 1996, Lomax largely retired. In 2002 he died at the age of eighty-seven in a nursing home in Safety Harbor, Florida.

The Music

Collecting Southern Folk Music. Thomas Edison’s widow gave Lomax’s father an old-fashioned Edison cylinder machine, so that he might record Negro tunes for a forthcoming book of American ballads. In the summer of 1933, Lomax accompanied his father on a trip for the Library of Congress, during which they recorded a prisoner in Angola, Louisiana, named Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly.

Lomax’s father helped secure Leadbelly’s release in 1934, and Lomax produced Leadbelly’s albums Negro Sinful Songs (1939) and The Midnight Special (1940), prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet. Lomax and his father held part of the copyright to Leadbelly’s song “Goodnight Irene,” and the royalties they received when the Weavers’ recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.

Lomax also recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930’s, an early oral-history project that resulted in a classic twelve-volume set of recordings and an influential book on early jazz, Mister Jelly Roll (1950). The result of this music “archaeology” was the songs they gathered for the book American Ballads and Folk Songs.

The Caribbean and Florida Coast. During the 1930’s, Lomax was on the road regularly, gathering songs across rural America and in the Caribbean. He recorded gospel songs, Cajun fiddle tunes, country blues, calypsos, New Orleans jazz, Tex-Mex music, and Haitian voodoo rituals. The Great Depression and labor-organizing songs he collected were released in 1967 as Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.

In 1935 Lomax traveled with the writer Zora Neale Hurston and the folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle to collect music from the Georgia Sea Islands and along the Florida coast. The music of black migrant workers in the Sea Islands led Lomax and Barnicle to the Bahamas in 1935. While recording work songs from sponge fishermen on Andros Island, Lomax interviewed them about their jobs. When he returned to Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, he was expelled by officials who believed he was stirring up worker unrest.

Working ceaselessly, Lomax and his partner released more song collections in the ensuing years, including Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, Our Singing Country, and Folk Song: U.S.A. Lomax and his father changed the popular perception of folk music from archival nostalgia into a living expression of the common man and contemporary culture. In the process, they unearthed musical artists whose work would become enduring contributions to the musical landscape of the United States.

The War Years. In 1943 the Library of Congress had decided it could no longer fund the Lomax father-and-son song-gathering expeditions, which were mostly done on a shoestring budget. Lomax joined the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to the U.S. Office of War Information, the wartime propaganda agency, and to the Army’s Special Services until the end of World War II. As a civilian, he continued his prewar activities, exploring the origins of the blues with Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, and Big Bill Broonzey; hosting a folk music series On Top of Old Smokey for the Mutual Network; and supporting the developing folk music revival by signing on as the director of folk music at Decca Records.

Europe. During the era of McCarthyism, from the late 1940’s to the late 1950’s, when left-wing performers were blacklisted because of their political views, Lomax left the country. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study British folk music, and he lived in England from 1950 to 1957. He compiled an archive of British folk songs, and he created programs for English radio and television. From 1951 to 1957, he served as the editor for the Columbia Records World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, and he released his findings on the ten-album Folk Songs of Great Britain. Lomax also collected folk music in Spain in 1953-1954 and in Italy in 1955, helping to spur folk revivals in those countries. Those collecting trips also resulted in two ten-part BBC radio series, on Spanish and Italian folk music. From 1955 to 1964, Columbia Records issued the eighteen-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, a pioneering survey of world music that included songs from French Africa, Indonesia, Korea, Formosa, and Venezuela. Folk Songs of the United States, a five-album set, was drawn from Lomax’s field recordings for the Library of Congress.

Back to the South. When he returned to the United States, Lomax revisited the Deep South, where he continued documenting African American culture. Along the way, he discovered country bluesman Mississippi Fred. On a 1962 trip to the Caribbean, Lomax recorded calypsos, Indo-Caribbean chaupai songs, work songs, children’s songs, and steel-band music. He left an archive of Caribbean music at the University of the West Indies, which also shared in the royalties on recordings.

University Career. Lomax became a research associate in Columbia University’s department of anthropology and Center for the Social Sciences in 1962, where he began research in cantometrics and choreometrics. These are systems for notating and studying music and dance to discover broad patterns correlating musical styles to other social factors, from subsistence methods to attitudes about sexuality. He was associated with Columbia University until 1989, when he moved his work to Hunter College.

World Travel. Funded by numerous grants, Lomax continued to travel the world, documenting music in Spain, Africa, France, the Caribbean, the West Indies, and various prisons around the world. The results of these trips have been steadily released by Rounder Records, which has produced more than a hundred albums. In 1966 Lomax began to work in film, and he accumulated enough footage to make several documentary films, including the 1990 public television series American Patchwork.

The Global Jukebox. In the 1980’s, Lomax began work on the Global Jukebox, a database of thousands of songs and dances cross-referenced with anthropological data. With video, text, and sound, the Global Jukebox lets users trace cross-cultural connections and seek historical roots. The MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation gave Lomax grants to create the Global Jukebox, and in 1989 he set up the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College to work on the project.

In 2004 public television told the story of some of his extensive travels with its documentary Lomax the Song Hunter (2004), a Dutch film directed by Rogier Kappers and produced by Joost Verhey for MM Filmprodukties in coproduction with Netherlands Programmes Service. When director Kappers visited him in 2001, Lomax could no longer speak because of the effects of a stroke, so Kappers portrayed him through the commentary of family, friends, and colleagues. The director retraced, in an identical van, Lomax’s journeys made decades earlier in Scotland, Spain, and Italy, to film the songs and dances of people he recorded in those places. The documentary, which has won several awards, was aired on the public television series POV in 2006.

Musical Legacy

In a 1991 interview with Charles Kuralt, Lomax spoke of his work and how it changed the lives of the artists he recorded:

he incredible thing was, when you could play this material back to the people, it changed everything for them. They realized that their stuff and they were just as good as anybody else. Then I found out that what I was really doing—and what my father was really doing—was giving an avenue for these people to express themselves and their side of the story.

Lomax dedicated his entire life to collecting and recording the world’s folk music. From the time he left his position at the Library of Congress in 1942 through the end of his long and productive career as an internationally known folklorist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host, Lomax amassed one of the most important collections of ethnographic material in the world. Acting on his belief that folklore and expressive culture are essential to human continuity and adaptation, he made it his lifelong goal to create a public platform for their continued use and enjoyment as well as a scientific framework for their further understanding. His efforts ensured that people everywhere could share the priceless heritage of music. Lomax’s groundbreaking work allowed hundreds of performers to carry folk tradition into the twenty-first century, and he preserved the flavor and integrity of the original work.

Lomax’s substantial collection of sound recordings, motion picture recordings, photographs, journals, field notes, and other material was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2004. The Alan Lomax Collection comprises the unparalleled ethnographic documentation collected by Lomax over a period of sixty years, and it joins the material collected during the 1930’s and early 1940’s for the Library’s Archive of American Folk Song. In 1997 Rounder Records began issuing its Alan Lomax Collection, a series of more than a hundred albums recorded by Lomax in the Deep South, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, the British Isles, Spain, and Italy. A recording Lomax made in Mississippi in 1959 of a prisoner, James Carter, singing the work song “Po’ Lazarus,” opens the Grammy Award-winning sound track of the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Bibliography

Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: New Press, 2002. In this memoir, Lomax surveys the blues, introduces some of the genre’s great artists, and reveals the soul of American black music: its history, its poetry, and its connections to African culture. The book earned a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1993.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Writings, 1934-1997. Edited by Ronald D. Cohen. New York: Routledge, 2005. Drawing on the Lomax Archives in New York, this book brings together articles from the 1930’s onward. It is divided into four sections, each capturing a distinct period in the development of Lomax’s career: the original years as a collector and promoter; the period from 1950 to 1958 when Lomax was recording throughout Europe; the folk-music revival years; and finally his work in academia.

Porterfield, Nolan. Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1948. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Although the book is a biography of Lomax’s father, there is information on Lomax’s early years and his start as a folklorist on his father’s expeditions for the Library of Congress.

Principal Recordings

albums (as producer): The Grey Goose, 1934 (with James Baker and John Avery Lomax); The Gypsy Davey, 1940 (with Woody Guthrie); Sod Buster Ballads: Folk Songs of the Early West, 1941 (with the Almanac Singers, including Pete Seeger and Guthrie); Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads, 1942 (with others); Listen to Our Story: A Panorama of American Ballads, 1947 (with others); Negro Prison Songs from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, 1947; Alan Lomax Presents Folk Song Saturday Night, 1950 (with others); Darling Corey, 1950 (with Pete Seeger); Irish Folk Songs, 1950 (with Seamus Ennis); Mountain Frolic, 1950; Take This Hammer: Huddie Ledbetter Memorial Album, 1950; English Folk Songs, 1954 (with Peter Kennedy); French Folk Songs, 1954; Spanish Folk Music, 1954; Alan Lomax Sings Great American Ballads, 1958; American Song Train, 1958 (with others); Music and Song of Italy, 1958 (with Diego Carpitella); Texas Folk Songs, 1958 (with Guy Carawan and John Cole); Blues in the Mississippi Night, 1959 (with others); American Folk Songs for Children, 1960 (with others); Sounds of the South, 1960 (with others); Animal Songs, 1961 (with Kennedy); The Child Ballads, Vol. 1, 1961 (with Francis James Child); The Child Ballads, Vol. 2, 1961 (with Child); Folk Songs of the Ozarks, 1961 (with others); Georgia Sea Islands, Vol. 1, 1961; Georgia Sea Islands, Vol. 2, 1961; Heather and Glen, 1961; Jack of All Trades, 1961 (with Kennedy); Negro Church Music, 1961; Sailormen and Servingmaids, 1961 (with Kennedy); Songs of Christmas, 1961 (with Kennedy); Songs of Courtship, 1961 (with Kennedy); Songs of Seduction, 1961 (with Kennedy); White Spirituals, 1961; Brown Girl in the Ring, 1962; Hootenanny 2, 1963 (with others); Hootenanny 3, 1963 (with others); Raise a Ruckus and Have a Hootenanny with Alan Lomax and the Dupree Family, 1963 (with the Dupree Family); The Wayfaring Stranger, 1963 (with Burl Ives); Animal Songs, 1964 (with Kennedy); Italian Folk Songs, 1965 (with Carla Bianco); Andalusia, 1969; The Spanish Basques, 1969; Woody Guthrie Remembered, 1971 (with others); Cowboy Songs of the Old West, 1994 (with Ed McCurdy); The Spanish Recordings: Mallorca—The Balearic Islands, 2007.

writings of interest:Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, 1936 (with John Avery Lomax); American Ballads and Folk Songs, 1941 (with John Avery Lomax); Our Singing Country, 1941 (with John Avery Lomax); American Folk Song and Folklore, 1942 (with Sidney Robertson Cowell); Folk Songs of the United States, 1942; Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 1945 (with John Avery Lomax); Folk Song: U.S.A., 1947 (with John Avery Lomax); The People’s Songbook, 1948 (with Waldemar Hille); Tribal Voices in Many Tongues, 1949; Mister Jelly Roll, 1950; Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, 1955-1964; Folk Songs of North America, 1960; Folk Songs of Great Britain, 1961; Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, 1967; Folk Song Style and Culture, 1968 (with Edwin E. Erickson); The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs, 1968; Three Thousand Years of Black Poetry: An Anthology, 1970 (with Raoul Abdul); The Land Where the Blues Began, 1993; Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997, 2003 (with Ronald D. Cohen).