Alan Lomax, son of folklorist John A. Lomax, is one of the most important folk-song collectors.
Alan Lomax (1915-2002)
by E. David Gregory, Peter Kennedy, Shirley Collins
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2004), pp. 548-557
FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL VOLUME 8, NUMBER 4, 2003, PP.548-564 ISSN 0531-9684
Obituary- Alan Lomax (1915-2002)
Alan Lomax died on 19 July 2002. Born in Austin, Texas, on 31 January 1915, Alan was the third child of John and Bess (ne'e Brown) Lomax. He spent most of his youth in Dallas and Austin, graduating with a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Texas in 1936. Introduced to folk song and folklore in the family home, he went on his first collecting trip with his father in 1933, visiting the infamous Parchman State Farm at Canton, Mississippi. During the next three years father and son made pioneering recordings of Cajun and Creole music, the Soul Stirrers, Aunt Molly Jackson, Leadbelly, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, jointly edited by John and Alan, was published in 1936. Alan also helped his father to compile American Ballads and Folk Songs, the first of several influential American folk-song collections edited by the Lomaxes.
[Alan Lomax, Jean Ritchie and Shirley Collins, c. 1960 Photograph courtesy of George Pickow & Copyright English Folk Dance and Song Society and authors]
In 1937 Alan obtained the post of Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress in Washington. He catalogued a growing volume of field recordings contributed by such folklorists as Sidney Robertson Cowell, Herbert Halpert, and Vance Randolph. He hired the young Pete Seeger as his assistant in compiling a Checklist of Recorded Songs in the EnglishL anguagein the Archive of American Folk Song to July, 1940. He also compiled, with Sidney Cowell, American Folk Song and Folk-lore: A Regional Bibliography. Research trips took him to the Southern Appalachians, the mid West, the Deep South, the Bahamas, and Haiti.
Especially significant were his field recordings of blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta, including the young Muddy Waters, Son House, and Honeyboy Edwards. Other singers whom he recorded for the Archive included Sarah Ogan Gunning and Woody Guthrie. He also made an invaluable contribution to the history of jazz, interviewing at length jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. His Morton recordings would be issued as a twelve-volume L.P. set in 1950, to accompany the publication of his book, Mr. Jelly Roll. Another major project was the release of eleven albums of traditional music collectively titled Folk Songs of the United States. Charges of political bias resulted in Alan's resignation as archivist in the fall of 1942. He had encouraged the Almanac Singers to develop a repertoire that mixed traditional folk songs with union and other political material, formed a similar group (comprised of unionized office workers) called the Priority Ramblers, and participated in the famous 'Grapes of Wrath' concert that featured Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Will Geer.
Lomax's enormous energy and enthusiasm for folk music soon found other outlets. He began his career as a broadcaster in 1939, with a twenty-six-part series titled American Folk Songs on the CBS network's American School of the Air. A follow-ups eries, Wellspringosf Americar, an for another twenty-six weeks during the winter of 1939-40. Then came Back Where I Come From, with regular performers Josh White and Pete Seeger. He also found opportunities to produce recordings by his favourite artists. Negro Sinful Songs performed by Leadbelly, the first commercial album of Afro-American folk songs, was followed by two influential releases on Victor: The Midnight Special: Songs of Texas Prisons and Guthrie's Dust bowl Ballads. A lan spent the remaining war years working for the Office of War Information and for the Special Services unit of the US Army. He produced and hosted a CBS radio series titled Transatlantic Call that was also broadcast in wartime Britain by the BBC.
A by-product was his first radio ballad, The Martins and the Coys, which starred Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. Another was his first film script, To Hear My Banjo Play. After the war, Lomax earned his living as a record producer, broadcaster, impresario, journalist, and freelance writer. Cognizant of the power of mass media, for the music he loved, folk song and blues. His journalism included an influential piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine titled 'America Sings the Saga of America'. He co-edited a new collection of traditional songs, Best Loved American Folk Songs. As Director of Folk Music for Decca Records, he issued compilations of hillbilly music and country blues, and folk-song recordings by Burl Ives and Carl Sandburg.
He returned to broadcasting as a disc jockey, hosting a programme on the Mutual Broadcasting Network titled Your Ballad Man. This was succeeded by On Top of Old Smokey, a series that was heard coast to coast. He was also active as an impresario, organizing a variety of folkmusic, jazz and blues concerts. A passionate advocate of racial equality, he often featured black musicans. One such concert series, Midnight Special, held at New York's Town Hall during 1946, led to an evening in the Decca studios with Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson that resulted in the powerful documentary Blues in the Mississippi Night. The finest achievement of Alan's stint with Decca, the content was too hot to handle, and the recordings were issued only in 1959 when the bluesmen were safe from retaliation for their candid reminiscences about segregation and the penitentiary system. During the late forties he made further recordings at the Parchman State Penitentiary, some of which would later be released as Murderer's Home: Negro Prison Songs.
Lomax's horizons as an ethnomusicologist expanded in the late 1940s. He was now convinced of the need for a systematic effort to record for posterity the traditional music of all regions of the world, and he persuaded Goddard Lieberson to commission the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music s et of LP records. In 1950 he moved to Europe, making London his base for eight years, but the Columbia project was fraught with difficulties, since in many countries no national folk-music archives existed. Where possible Alan worked closely with such local ethnomusicologists as Peter Kennedy in England, Hamish Henderson in Scotland, Seamus Ennis in Ireland, and Diego Carpitella in Italy, while Bert Lloyd handled Eastern Europe. In the event, only eighteen of the planned thirty volumes of field recordings were ever issued. The quality varied from LP to LP, but many of the discs were quickly recognized as the best available overview of a given country's traditional music.
Lomax played a significant role in the English folk-song revival through his influence on such friends as Peter Kennedy, Ewan MacColl, Bert Lloyd and Shirley Collins, through his skiffle group The Ramblers (for which he brought Peggy Seeger to England), by his participation in the Ballads and Blues folk club in the late fifties, and, above all, by means of his many radio and television broadcasts. Too numerous to list in full, his BBC radio programmes included several series that brought British listeners up to speed on the American folk-song revival. Other programmes, such as 'I Heard Scotland Sing', a collaboration with Seamus Ennis called 'The Gaelic West', and the six-part series A Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain, presented some of his field collecting in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He also participated with Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd in Ballads and Blues, and in Charles Parker's experimental 'Sing Christmas and the Turn of the Year'. Lomax was also the first folklorist to host a BBC television series, the eight-part Song Hunter: Alan Lomax, while for Granada he made fourteen programmes featuring The Ramblers. He made one movie while in England, Oss, Oss, Wee Oss, about traditional May Day ceremonies at Padstow in Cornwall. As a performer he recorded several discs for HMV, Nixa, Melodisc and Decca. Most important of all were his field recordings of traditional singers and musicians, including, among many others, Harry Cox, Margaret Barry, Seamus Ennis, Jeannie Robertson, Jimmy MacBeath, Davie Stewart, and John Strachan. Selections from these recordings were used in the influential ten-volume LP series, The Folk Songs of Britain, the first systematic
overview of British traditional song on record.
Lomax collected even more extensively
in Spain and Italy than he did in the British
Isles. His BBC programmes on Spanish folk
music provided an overview of the wealth
of recordings that he made in Spain during
1952-53. An introductory survey titled
The Folk Music of Spain was followed by a
six-part series titled Spanish Folk Music.
Many of the recordings were also issued as
LP records. He spent most of 1954 in
Italy, returning to England with far more
field recordings than he required for either
the projected Italian volume in the
Columbia World Library or for the BBC
radio series, The Folk Music of Italy. Along
with the Spanish recordings, Alan's Italian
field recordings represent one of his most
important legacies as a collector. His
seminal article 'Folk Song Style' summarized
many of the conclusions he had come
to while working on the Columbia World
Libraryp roject.
Lomax returned to North America in
the summer of 1958. Resolved to undertake
for his native land the systematic field
collecting that he had done in Europe, he
ranged widely, recording singers and
instrumentalists (including Vera Ward
Hall and bluesman Fred McDowell) in
nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia,
Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina,
Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.
This recording project was one of Alan's
greatest achievements. The results
appeared on two LP sets: Prestige's
Southern Journey and Atlantic's Southern
Folk Heritage. Another legacy was The
Rainbow Sign, an expose of racism in the
South based on the life of Vera Ward Hall.
The sixties witnessed the civil rights
movement and a folk-music boom, in both
of which Alan was heavily involved. He
was one of the gurus of the sixties folk
revival. A prolific editor of folk-song
collections, his most impressive compilation
appeared in 1960: the six-hundredpage
Folk Songs of North America. Underpinned
with solid scholarship, it was highly
effective as a work of popularization.
Other publications included The Penguin
Book of American Folk Songs, Hard Hitting
Songsfor Hard Hit People, and new editions
of Folk Song USA and The LeadbellyL egend.
Alan took part in the campaign against
racial discrimination in Mississippi, and
worked with Guy Carawan to produce a
documentary account of the civil rights
movement in Georgia. He was also closely
involved with organizing the 1968 Poor
People's March on Washington. His
characteristic way of blending music, civil
rights and left-wing politics was evident on
the Newport Folk Festival organizing
committee. He stressed the importance
of presenting both traditional musicians of
all kinds and radical young protest singers
such as Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. He also
insisted on the need to include black artists
and was responsible for the appearance at
Newport of a number of elderly blues
legends, including Mississippi John Hurt,
Skip James and Son House.
In the early sixties Lomax returned to
academic life. As Research Associate at
Columbia University he was the recipient
5 5 2 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
of a Rockefeller Foundation research grant
for a major study of the folk life and music
of the West Indies. His fieldwork in the
Caribbean during the early sixties aimed at
documenting both the African heritage and
the cultural unity of the region. In 1963 he
became Director of the Cantometrics and
Choreometrics Research Project, building
up a research team and taking responsibility
for obtaining the necessary funding:
grantsmanship was a skill at which he
excelled. The next two decades of his
academic life were devoted primarily to
cantometrics, his term for the scientific
study of the relationship between popular
musical styles and the socio-economic
environment of the performers. His study
of choreometrics (the quantitative analysis
of popular dance) parallelled his research
on traditional music. In 1967 he began
publishing the results of these research
projects, and the next year he and his staff
issued Folk Song Style and Culture. More
articles followed in the early seventies, and
in 1976 he produced Cantometrics:A n
Approach to the Anthropology of Music, a
handbook accompanied by a set of audiotapes
intended as a practical teaching aid.
On the whole, the response of academic
ethnomusicologists to cantometrics has
been one of indifference or even hostility.
In a climate of relativistic postmodernism
Lomax's avowed positivism is out of
fashion.
Always happiest with microphone and
camera in hand, Alan was fascinated with
the possibilities of using film to record,
analyse, and popularize traditional dance.
In 1976, in collaboration with Forrestine
Paulay, he directed the film Dance and
Human History. Then he returned to
Mississippi to make the TV movie The
Land Where the Blues Began, which won a
Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival
in 1985. His last book was published in
1993 with the same title. His fieldwork in
Mississippi, Louisiana and Arizona also
provided material for a television series
on regional American music and dance,
American Patchwork. He was awarded a
National Medal of the Arts by President
Reagan in 1986.
Throughout his life a vocal campaigner
for civil rights and racial equality, Alan
assumed in 1998 the role of Director of
the Association for Cultural Equity. As
Research Associate in Anthropology at
Hunter College, he embarked on another
major research project that he called 'The
Global Jukebox'. His aim was to create
interactive software that would function as
an 'intelligent museum' of traditional song
and dance. The Alan Lomax Collection, an
attempt to carry further the idea behind
the ColumbiaW orldL ibraryi,s the first fruit
of this project to reach the public. When
completed, this collection on Rounder
Records will comprise one hundred and
fifty CDs. For half a century, Lomax's
vision remained constant: to make widely
accessible the traditional song, instrumental
music and dance of each and every
ethnic group and region as an antidote to
global cultural homogenization and commercialization.
1
E. DAVID GREGORY
Athabasca University
Note
For a more detailed account of Lomax's life and
accomplishments, see E. David Gregory, 'Alan
Lomax: A Life in Folk Music,' Canadian Folk Music!
Bulletin de musique folklorique canadienne, 36.4
(2002), 5-17. Bibliographical details of Lomax's
publications and recordings, omitted for reasons of
space here, will be found in this article. For an
account of Lomax's time in Britain, see E. David
Gregory, 'Lomax in London,' Folk Music Journal 8.2
(2002), 136-69.
OBITUARY 553
I had the great honour and pleasure to
work with Alan through the 1950s when
he came to work in Europe following the
death of his father. My parents, Douglas
and Helen, and my aunt Maud Karpeles,
already knew the family; for it was while
Cecil Sharp and Maud were visiting the
Southern Appalachians in search of songs of
English origin during the First World War,
that his father, John Lomax, from 1910
had been collecting cowboy songs and
searching out American traditions. My
own interest had been stimulated during
the Second World War through listening
to 'Voice of America' and I had come to
know the recordings of both father and son
in the Library of Congress. After the war
we were treated to concert performances
of Burl Ives, Josh White and Pete Seeger,
who mainly drew upon the Lomax collections.
The Seegers came from a family who
as children were brought up listening to
Lomax field tapes while their mother,
Ruth, transcribed the collections for the
various American folk-song collections.
At the time of Alan's first visit, I was
doing a monthly West Country radio
series, Village Barn Dance, and living in a
caravan based at Cheddar. I remember we
were still rationed then and I had been
disappointed to find no-one in Cheddar
still making the local cheese, now world
famous, but originally kept cool by being
stored in the local caves. My first
encounter I remember with the pain like
that you get from an elder brother. It was
the speed and skill with which Alan
plunged his knife into the butter plate
and, with one swift trawl, purloined our
family's full week's ration and devoured it
in a matter of seconds. Stunned, I must
have sat there open-mouthed but, as
expected of an Englishman, no comment
issued forth. It wasn't long after that I
discovered that this was no ignorance on
Alan's part, but just his way of testing
what he called our middle-class English
restraint, and in fact, if you survived this
initiation rite, you would be his friend for
life.
We talked and sang through the first
night and early morning and revelled in
our common family backgrounds, the two
of us, suffocated by our parent's calling as
they followed in the steps of their masters,
we both agreed that we thought we could
do better. Alan obviously missed his father
but voiced criticism of his autocratic
southern attitude to the poor whites and
coloured. He told me how he and his
father had toured the States, taking round
with them and displaying Leadbelly, out of
the penitentiary on probation, almost like a
fairground creature; so Alan had made sure
that the singer and his family would be
remunerated from their copyright royalties.
In fact Alan had arrived in Europe
very much on his family half-share of
'Goodnight Irene' which had just gone into
the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
I, in turn, had already started out with
my tape recorder and was surprised to
find, at that time before Alan's arrival, that
neither my father, nor the EFDSS, the
Gramophone Company nor the BBC,
seemed to recognize the importance of
tape recording the last shanty-singer and
the other legacy-holders. At the time,
collecting songs and dances was my offduty
hobby, while I was in training at
Bristol as a broadcaster. I thought the
recording was unique within my family. It
was only later, on a trip to visit my family
in Edinburgh, that I discovered that my
great-aunt, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, had
used an Edison Bell phonograph to record
Gaelic singers and pipe-tunes in the
Hebrides. So when Alan told me that
what I was doing was 'just fantastic', he
swelled my head and strengthened my
554 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
elbow and I decided my hobby must
become my work. Then Alan told me of
his little project.
With the help of his father's legacy and
'Goodnight Irene,' he had persuaded
Columbia Records to let him put the
whole world's music on a series of LPs, to
be called The World Library of Folk and
Primitive Music. At the time I thought it 'big
talk', secretly wishing that I had had the
idea first, but I readily agreed to help with
the three albums planned from Britain and
to travel abroad to bring back representative
tapes from other countries. So for the
English album I rescued the off-cuts of my
West Country Village Barn Dance programmes
from the BBC waste-basket at
Bristol and supplemented them with some,
then unknown, concert singers, Isla
Cameron, Bert Lloyd and Jimmy Miller
(later calling himself Ewan McColl). They
were re-issued by Rounder Records in
1998 exactly as edited in 1950: England
(Rounder 1741), Ireland (Rounder 1742)
and Scotland (Rounder 1743)
For the rest of the world, Maud
Karpeles and I would try and locate field
workers who already had recordings and
were starting to tape-record in other parts
of the world. In fact, where none existed,
Alan took on the job himself, as he did so
fantastically in both Spain and Italy - in the
latter sparking a folk revival quite as
exciting as the one fired in Britain and
Ireland. From my visit to Yugoslavia in
1951 , I edited and wrote the notes for
Volume 5 in the LP series (re-released in
2001 with additional notes on a double CD
set as Rounder 1745).
Like a younger brother in these ventures,
I was ready to absorb all I could
from the recording experiences Alan in
turn had learned from his father. I should
also add that I was also wondrously
impressed and jealous of all those lovely
languishing ladies Alan always had in tow,
increasing his reputation. In fact, his sexual
prowess soon became part of BBC
folklore.
In those days the best quality reel-to-reel
tapes were called 'Durex' and made by
3M, later called 'Scotch and even Irish
Boy'. In England in those days, when
young men visited the chemist's, they
would wait embarassingly for a male
assistant and, instead of using the unmentionable
word 'condom', they would ask
for a packet of 'Durex'. So, typical of
Alan, when we were taking part in a
programme in the BBC in Glasgow, Alan,
in a loud voice, asked a pretty young office
girl to have 100 Durex for his own use
sent up by train from London. Thus it was
that he became a folk legend at the BBC.
Alan had a particular love affair with the
BBC Features Department and the Third
Programme, both in Britain as well as in
Italy. His main allies in the BBC in London
were in the Features Department and
included D.G. Bridson, Jack Dillon and
Brian George, and I treasure memories of
the programmes they allowed him to
produce, using both Seamus Ennis and
myself as presenters, juxtaposing British
and American traditions. Perhaps the most
outstanding was 'The Gaelic West' in
which Seamus compared Scots and Irish
language and music.
At the time, we were in the process of
persuading Recorded Programmes to
employ a full-time field worker for
regional speech, music and custom, the
argument being that the Corporation's
broadcasting was nearly always using a
standardized BBC English and it was thus
important that the British tax-payer should
be contributing to retain regional identity
and cultural individuality. So Alan threatened
to take Seamus and myself to the
States if the BBC did not employ us as field
OBITUARY 555
workers. It worked. So, very much
through Alan's legendary position and
persuasion, both of us landed the job.
So what was so special about Alan's
fieldwork and programmes? There was no
time-wasting preliminary chit-chat;
although his intensity might seem like
rudeness, he always came straight to the
point, and his informants always responded
to the charm of his Texan tenacity. His
scripting and presentation, on radio, and
later on TV, was extremely 'earthy',
cruet-sprinkled with sex and passion. So
many of our combined recording and
filming trips continue to live with me.
Outstanding was our first encounter with
the pub-singers at 'The Ship' at Blaxhall,
Suffolk and our visit to Padstow with Jean
Ritchie and George Pickow to film the
May Hobby Horse, after which we spent a
hundred nights in a dark-room editing
sound to picture.
We only had one camera and some of
the first good quality 16 mm colour film,
and, because these events happen with an
unstoppable procession, it was physically
tiring, at one point involving driving a
French car backwards in front of the horse
and teaser, so we took turns in filming and
recording. Driving down to Cornwall in
my recording van, I briefed our crew as to
what was likely to happen but some scenes
developed we had never envisaged. At
three minutes to midnight we signed a
contract with 'the people of Padstow' and
off we went. For the very first time, under
the leadership of Charlie Bate, the crowds
donned headscarves and colourful costumes
and approval of our efforts was
only granted after a preliminary showing in
the local cinema.
On radio, the highlight of his stay in
Britain was the Christmas Day live broadcast
in 1957. Every year, before the
Queen's speech, the BBC microphone
used to visit remote lighthouse-keepers
and coastguards and the like, but this year
Alan co-opted Radio Ballads producer,
Charles Parker, and placed his disciples at
all the regional stations. I was in Plymouth
with Charlie Bate, sub-mariner, Cyril
Tawney, the Skinners Bottom Gleesingers
and the Marshfield Mummers. Through
our pudding and punch haze, the recordings
went on in the wrong order, but I am
glad to see that fifty years later all has been
properly restored and the original 'Round
Britain' programme is now available on
Folktrax 950 and Rounder 1850. The
Christmas Day broadcasts never recovered
from the shock.
The breadth of his impact was enormous.
From his sexy passion on popular
radio and TV to his academic approach on
the Third in Britain and Italy, after Alan's
eight years here, the country was never the
same again The intensity of his dedication
to the power of the people knew no
bounds. Beryl and I always remember the
wrath he vented on her when he was
showing his latest Louisiana Cajun video in
his tower-block apartment in New York.
In a moment of distraction, and before I
could restrain her, Beryl saw a large
observation balloon passing the window
and went to have a look. After the
explosion inside the flat we were forced
to see the film again from the beginning
and instructed not to take our eyes away.
We hated him, we loved him and we miss
him.
PETER KENNEDY
Gloucester
I first heard of Alan Lomax though the
radio back in the 1950s on his enthralling
programmes 'Adventures of a Ballad
Hunter'. In his captivating and colourful
manner he told of his times collecting
American folk music for the Library of
556 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
Congress. A few years later, I was to meet
him at a party that Ewan McColl threw in
his honour on his return to London from
his field trips in Italy and Spain. Alan
Lomax was an affable, tall, solid Texan
with a big head of shaggy dark hair, and he
put me in mind of an American bison.
Shortly after, I went to live and work
with him in London. He was putting
together his book The Folk Songs of North
America, and the album series The Columbia
World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. He
was often a demanding man to work for as
there was so much to get done, but he was
appreciative too. They were busy and
eventful times, the house often full of
visiting singers like Margaret Barry, Davey
Stewart, Seamus Ennis, or American
bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie
McGhee, Memphis Slim, and Muddy
Waters, for whom Alan cooked a special
Southern dinner of fried chicken and
smothered greens to make him feel at
home.
He returned to the States in 1958, and I
joined him in 1959 for a three-month
recording trip to the Southern States,
where I had the privilege of working with
him in the field. Under often difficult
conditions, long days and many nights of
work, travelling long distances, he was
unfailingly patient and friendly with the
people we met, his approach informal and
sympathetic, coaxing compelling performances
from the most nervous of singers,
strangers becoming friends. He had charming
Southern manners (when he wanted
to), a rather mischievous chuckle and the
ability to make people laugh. But most of
all, people liked and trusted him.
He passionately loved traditional song,
whether it was sung by white mountain
singers in Kentucky or Arkansas, black
fishermen of the Georgia Sea Islands or
black prisoners in the Mississippi State
Penitentiary. I recall how physically and
emotionally exhausted he was after our
four days there at Parchman Farm. The compassion he felt for the prisoners, his outrage at the many injustices he saw
combined with the tough physical conditions, the extreme heat of the Delta and the long hours he worked, took their toll. He felt guilty, too, that he could drive away from it all, leaving the singers incarcerated.
[Alan Lomax
Photograph by Shirley Collins]
I have seen him helpless with laughter on Hobart Smith's front porch in Virginia; watched him brush tears from his eyes in Como, Northern Mississippi, as we recorded in wonder the black tenant farmer brothers Lonnie and Ed Young dancing a survival of a primitive African serpent ritual; shared his exhilaration at the enthrallingly vigorous and strident singing of the Sacred Harp Convention in Alabama; and for once seen him lost for words after our first recording of Mississippi Fred McDowell, who'd come to play one evening after he'd finished picking his cotton crop. 'Perfect' was the single word Alan wrote in his notebook.
He has often been accused of being arrogant and a romantic. But what I feel he was doing was expressing vividly his
fascination, his passion and concern both for the music and the people who sang it, compensating for the neglect and scorn
both have had to endure in so many ways. He felt, as I do, that the miracle of traditional culture is mankind's most
valuable asset, carrying in its memory thousands of years of human experience. He was urging us to value it and not let it
slip away, or be overwhelmed by the dominance of commercial music. And what a legacy he has given us in all his
field recordings of singers, some ordinary, some extraordinary, making the music accessible to new generations. He was
the champion of working people and folk music, and to me a hero still.
SHIRLEY COLLINS
Lewes, Sussex
Alan Lomax (From Wikipedia)
Background information
Born January 31, 1915(1915-01-31)
Died July 19, 2002(2002-07-19) (aged 87)
Occupations Folklorist, ethnomusicologist, musician
Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.
Early Life
Lomax was the son of pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Because of frail health he was mostly home schooled, but attended The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) for a year, graduating in 1930 at age 15.[1] He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1930 and the following year studied philosophy at Harvard but upon his mother's death interrupted his education to console his father and join him on his folk song collecting field trips. He subsequently earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas and later did graduate studies with Melville J. Herskovits at Columbia University and with Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Pennsylvania. To some, he is best known for his theories of Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics, elaborated from 1960 until his death with the help of collaborators Victor Grauer, Conrad Arensberg, Forrestine Paulay, and Roswell Rudd.
From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings. During his lifetime, he collected folk music from the United States, Haiti, the Caribbean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture.
A pioneering oral historian, he also recorded substantial interviews with many legendary folk musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, Irish singer Margaret Barry, Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson, and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, among many others. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor he took his recording machine into the streets to capture the reactions of everyday citizens. While serving in the army in World War II he made numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera", The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.
He also produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows, in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. In the late 1940s, he produced a highly regarded series of folk music albums for Decca records and organized a series of concerts at New York's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, featuring blues, Calypso, and Flamenco music. He also hosted a radio show, Your Ballad Man, from 1945-49 that was broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Radio Network and featured a highly eclectic program, from gamelan music, to Django Reinhardt, to Klezmer music, to Sidney Bechet and Wild Bill Davison, to jazzy pop songs by Maxine Sullivan and Jo Stafford, to readings of the poetry of Carl Sandburg, to hillbilly music with electric guitars, to Finnish brass bands – to name a few.[2]
[edit] Move to Europe and later lifeLomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly-invented LP records. For the British and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy, Scots poet Hamish Henderson, and with Séamus Ennis in Ireland, where they recorded Irish traditional musicians, including some of the songs in English and Irish of Elizabeth Cronin in 1951. He also hosted a folk music show on BBC's home service and organized a skiffle group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who included Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Shirley Collins, among others) which appeared on British television. His ballad opera Big Rock Candy Mountain premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot. In Scotland he is credited with being an inspiration for the School of Scottish Studies, founded in 1951, the year of his first visit there.[3][4]
Lomax and Diego Carpitella's survey of Italian folk music for the Columbia World Library, conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, 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 predominate in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.
Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, Folksong '59", in Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood; the Selah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs (a rock and roll group). The occasion marked the first time rock and roll and bluegrass were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs", Lomax told the audience. According to Izzy Young, the audience booed when he told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll. In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music . . . . At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing."[5]
Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold in February 1937. They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anna. Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi, and wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over the BBC home service as part of the war effort, as well as conducting lengthy interviews with folk music personalities including Reverend Gary Davis. He also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1936); with John Work and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts and Jean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean (1961); with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter, Anna L. Wood. All those who assisted and worked with him were accurately credited on the resultant Library of Congress and other recordings, as well as in his many books and publications.
Alan Lomax met 20-year-old English folk singer Shirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained a contract from Atlantic Records to re-record some the U.S. artists he had recorded in the 1940s, using improved recording equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Wade Ward, Charlie Higgins and Bessie Jones and culminated in the discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell. Recordings from this trip were issued under the title Sounds of the South and some were also featured in the Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. Lomax wished to marry Collins but when the recording trip was over, she returned to England and married Austin John Marshall. In an interview in The Guardian newspaper, Collins expressed irritation that Alan Lomax's 1993 account of the journey, The Land Where The Blues Began, barely mentioned her. "All it said was, 'Shirley Collins was along for the trip'. It made me hopping mad. I wasn't just 'along for the trip'. I was part of the recording process, I made notes, I drafted contracts, I was involved in every part".[6] Collins addressed the perceived omission in her memoir, America Over the Water, published in 2004.[a 1]
Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961.
In 1962, Lomax and singer and Civil Rights Activist Guy Carawan, music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album, Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961-62, on Vanguard Records for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth. Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; a Sicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska [1]; in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more.
[edit] International musicMusician Brian Eno had this to say about Lomax's later career:
[He later] turned his intelligent attentions to music from many other parts of the world, securing for them a dignity and status they had not previously been accorded. The "World Music" phenomenon arose partly from those efforts, as did his great book, Folk Song Style and Culture. I believe this is one of the most important books ever written about music, in my all time top ten. It is one of the very rare attempts to put cultural criticism onto a serious, comprehensible, and rational footing by someone who had the experience and breadth of vision to be able to do it."[7]
[edit] Cultural equity"The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice."—Alan Lomax, 1972[8]
As a member of the Popular Front and People's Songs in the 1940s, Alan Lomax promoted what was then known as "One World" and today is called multiculturalism.[9] In the late forties he produced a series of concerts at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall that presented Flamenco guitar and Calypso, along with country blues, Appalachian music, Andean music, and jazz. His radio shows of the 40s and 50s explored musics of all the world's peoples.
Lomax recognized that folklore (like all forms of creativity) occurs at the local and not the national level and flourishes not in isolation but in fruitful interplay with other cultures. He was dismayed that mass communications appeared to be crushing local cultural expressions and languages. In 1950 he echoed anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), who believed the role of the ethnologist should be that of advocate for primitive man (as indigenous people were then called), when he urged folklorists to similarly advocate for the folk. Some, such as Richard Dorson, objected that scholars shouldn't act as cultural arbiters, but Lomax believed it would be unethical to stand idly by as the magnificent variety of the world's cultures and languages was "grayed out" by centralized commercial entertainment and educational systems. Although he acknowledged potential problems with intervention, he urged that folklorists with their special training actively assist communities in safeguarding and revitalizing their own local traditions.
Similar ideas had been put into practice by Benjamin Botkin, Harold W. Thompson, and Louis C. Jones, who believed that folklore studied by folklorists should be returned to its home communities to enable it to thrive anew. They have been realized in the annual (since 1967) Smithsonian Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (for which Lomax served as a consultant), in national and regional initiatives by public folklorists and local activists in helping communities gain recognition for their oral traditions and lifeways both in their home communities and in the world at large; and in the National Heritage Awards, concerts, and fellowships given by the NEA and various State governments to master folk and traditional artists.[10]
In 2001, in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, UNESCO's Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity declared the safeguarding of languages and intangible culture on a par with protection of individual human rights and as essential for human survival as biodiversity is for nature,[11] ideas first articulated by Alan Lomax.
[edit] FBI investigationsFrom 1942 to 1979 Lomax was investigated and repeatedly interviewed by the FBI, although nothing incriminating was ever found and the investigation was eventually abandoned. Scholar and jazz pianist Ted Gioia uncovered and published extracts from Alan Lomax's 800-page FBI files.[12] The investigation appears to have started when an anonymous informant reported overhearing Lomax's father telling guests in 1941 about what he considered his son's Communist sympathies. Looking for leads, the FBI seized on the fact that, as a teenager in the 1930s, Lomax had transferred from Harvard to the University of Texas after being arrested in Boston in connection with a political demonstration. In 1942 the FBI sent agents to interview students at Harvard's freshman dorm about Lomax's participation in a demonstration that had occurred at Harvard in 1932 in support of the immigration rights of one Edith Berkman, a Jewish woman, dubbed the "red flame" for her labor organizing activities among the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and threatened with deportation as an alleged "Communist agitator".[13] Lomax had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined $25.00. Miss Berkman, however, had been cleared of all accusations against her and was not deported. Nor had Lomax's Harvard academic record been affected in any way by his activities in her defense. Nevertheless, the bureau continued trying vainly to show that in 1932 Lomax had either distributed Communist literature or made public speeches in support of the Communist Party.
According to Ted Gioia:
Lomax must have felt it necessary to address the suspicions. He gave a sworn statement to an FBI agent on April 3, 1942, denying both of these charges. He also explained his arrest while at Harvard as the result of police overreaction. He was, he claimed, 15 at the time – he was actually 17 and a college student – and he said he had intended to participate in a peaceful demonstration. Lomax said he and his colleagues agreed to stop their protest when police asked them to, but that he was grabbed by a couple of policemen as he was walking away. "That is pretty much the story there, except that it distressed my father very, very much", Lomax told the FBI. "'I had to defend my righteous position, and he couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand him. It has made a lot of unhappiness for the two of us because he loved Harvard and wanted me to be a great success there.' Lomax transferred to the University of Texas the following year".[12]
Lomax left Harvard in 1932 after a year of study there, because his father lost his job and all his money during the depression and could no longer afford to pay his tuition, and not for any political or academic reasons. He probably also had wanted to be close to his newly bereaved father, now a widower, and his 10-year old sister, Bess, who was now motherless.
In June 1942 the FBI approached the Librarian of Congress, Archibald McLeish, attempting to have Lomax fired as Assistant in Charge of the Library's Archive of American Folk Song. At the time, Lomax was preparing for a field trip to the Mississippi Delta on behalf of the Library, where he would make landmark recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, among others. McLeish wrote to Hoover defending Lomax: "I have studied the findings of these reports very carefully. I do not find positive evidence that Mr. Lomax has been engaged in subversive activities and I am therefore taking no disciplinary action toward him." Nevertheless, according to Gioia:
Yet what the probe failed to find in terms of prosecutable evidence, it made up for in speculation about his character. An FBI report dated July 23, 1943, describes Lomax as possessing "an erratic, artistic temperament" and a "bohemian attitude." It says: "He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results." The file quotes one informant who said that "Lomax was a very peculiar individual, that he seemed to be very absent-minded and that he paid practically no attention to his personal appearance." This same source adds that he suspected Lomax's peculiarity and poor grooming habits came from associating with the hillbillies who provided him with folk tunes".
Lomax, who was a founding member of People's Songs, was in charge of campaign music for Henry A. Wallace's 1948 Presidential run on the Progressive Party ticket on a platform opposing the arms race and supporting civil rights for Jews and African Americans. Subsequently, Lomax was one of the performers listed in the publication Red Channels as a possible Communist sympathizer and was consequently blacklisted from working in US entertainment industries.
A 2007 BBC news article revealed that in the early '50s, the British MI5 placed Alan Lomax under surveillance as a suspected Communist. Its report concluded that although Lomax undoubtedly held "left wing" views, there was no evidence he was a Communist. Released September 4, 2007 (File ref KV 2/2701), a summary of his MI5 file reads as follows:
Noted American folk music archivist and collector Alan Lomax first attracted the attention of the Security Service when it was noted that he had made contact with the Romanian press attaché in London while he was working on a series of folk music broadcasts for the BBC in 1952. Correspondence ensued with the American authorities as to Lomax' suspected membership of the Communist Party, though no positive proof is found on this file. The Service took the view that Lomax' work compiling his collections of world folk music gave him a legitimate reason to contact the attaché, and that while his views (as demonstrated by his choice of songs and singers) were undoubtedly left wing, there was no need for any specific action against him.
The file contains a partial record of Lomax' movements, contacts and activities while in Britain, and includes for example a police report of the "Songs of the Iron Road" concert at St Pancras in December 1953. His association with [blacklisted American] film director Joseph Losey is also mentioned (serial 30a).[14]
The FBI again investigated Lomax in 1956 and sent a 68 page report to the CIA and the Attorney General's office. However, William Tompkins, assistant attorney general, wrote to Hoover that the investigation had failed to disclose sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution or the suspension of Lomax's passport.
Then, as late as 1979, an FBI report suggested that Lomax had recently impersonated an FBI agent. The report appears to have been based on mistaken identity. The person who reported the incident to the FBI said that the man in question was around 43, about 5 feet 9 inches and 190 pounds. The FBI file notes that Lomax stood 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, weighed 240 pounds and was 64 at the time:
Lomax resisted the FBI's attempts to interview him about the impersonation charges, but he finally met with agents at his home in November 1979. He denied that he’d been involved in the matter but did note that he’d been in New Hampshire in July 1979, visiting a film editor about a documentary. The FBI's report concluded that "Lomax made no secret of the fact that he disliked the FBI and disliked being interviewed by the FBI. Lomax was extremely nervous throughout the interview".[12]
The FBI investigation was concluded the following year, shortly after Lomax's 65th birthday.
[edit] AwardsAlan Lomax received the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan in 1986, a Library of Congress Living Legend Award [2] in 2000, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from Tulane University in 2001 [3]. He 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, connecting the story of the origins of blues music with the prevalence of forced labor in the pre-World War II South (especially on the Mississippi levees). Lomax also received a posthumous Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 2003.[15] Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax (Rounder Records, 8 CDs boxed set) won in two categories at the 48th annual Grammy Awards ceremony held on Feb 8, 2006 [4]. The box set Alan Lomax In Haiti: Recordings For The Library Of Congress, 1936–1937, on Harte Records, featuring 10 CDs of recorded music and film footage (shot by Elizabeth Lomax), a bound book of Lomax's letters and field journals, and notes by musicologist Gage Avrill, was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2011.[16]
[edit] BibliographyA partial list of books by Alan Lomax includes:
L'Anno piu' felice della mia vita (The Happiest Year of My Life), a book of ethnographic photos by Alan Lomax from his 1954-55 fieldwork in Italy, edited by Goffredo Plastino, preface by Martin Scorsese. Milano: Il Saggiatore, M2008.
Alan Lomax: Mirades Miradas Glances Photos by Alan Lomax, ed. by Antoni Pizà (Barcelona: Lunwerg / Fundacio Sa Nostra, 2006) ISBN 84-9785-271-0
Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997. Ronald D. Cohen, Editor (includes a chapter defining all the categories of cantometrics). New York: Routledge: 2003.
Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean Compiler, with J. D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawes. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997 (Cloth, ISBN 0-679-40453-8); New York: Random House, 1998 (Cloth).
The Land Where The Blues Began. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music: Audiocassettes and a Handbook. Berkeley: University of California Media Extension Center, 1976.
Folk Song Style and Culture. With contributions by Conrad Arensberg, Edwin E. Erickson, Victor Grauer, Norman Berkowitz, Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay, Joan Halifax, Barbara Ayres, Norman N. Markel, Roswell Rudd, Monika Vizedom, Fred Peng, Roger Wescott, David Brown. Washington, D.C.: Colonial Press Inc, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Publication no. 88, 1968.
Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (1968)
3000 Years of Black Poetry. Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul, Editors. New York: Dodd Mead Company, 1969. Paperback edition, Fawcett Publications, 1971.
The Leadbelly Songbook. Moses Asch and Alan Lomax, Editors. Musical transcriptions by Jerry Silverman. Forward by Moses Asch. New York: Oak Publications, 1962.
Folk Songs of North America. Melodies and guitar chords transcribed by Peggy Seeger. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
The Rainbow Sign'. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1959.
Leadbelly: A Collection of World Famous Songs by Huddie Ledbetter. Edited with John A. Lomax. Hally Wood, Music Editor. Special note on Leadbelly's 12-string guitar by Pete Seeger. New York: Folkways Music Publishers Company, 1959.
Harriet and Her Harmonium: An American adventure with thirteen folk songs from the Lomax collection. Illustrated by Pearl Binder. Music arranged by Robert Gill. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1955.
Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz". Drawings by David Stone Martin. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1950.
Folk Song: USA. With John A. Lomax. Piano accompaniment by Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, c.1947. Republished as Best Loved American Folk Songs, New York: Grosset and Dunlap 1947 (Cloth).
Freedom Songs of the United Nations. With Svatava Jakobson. Washington, D.C.: Office of War Information, 1943.
Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. With John A. Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: MacMillan, 1941.
Check-list of Recorded Songs in the English Language in the Archive of American Folk Song in July 1940. Washington, D.C.: Music Division, Library of Congress, 1942. Three volumes.
American Folksong and Folklore: A Regional Bibliography. With Sidney Robertson Cowell. New York, Progressive Education Association, 1942. Reprint, Temecula, California: Reprint Services Corp., 1988 (62 pp. ISBN 0-7812-0767-3).
Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly. With John A. Lomax. New York: Macmillan, 1936.
American ballads and folk songs. With John Avery Lomax. Macmillan, 1934.
See also:
Books by John A. and Alan Lomax
Articles by Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax Discography
Alan Lomax Filmography
Alan Lomax Radio Programs
[edit] DVDsLomax the Songhunter, documentary directed by Rogier Kappers, 2004 (issued on DVD 2007).
American Patchwork television series, 1990 (five DVDs).
Oss Oss Wee Oss 1951 (on a DVD with other films related to the Padstow May Day).
Rhythms of Earth. Four films (Dance & Human History, Step Style, Palm Play, and The Longest Trail) made by Lomax (1974–1984) about his Choreometric cross-cultural analysis of dance and movement style. Two-and-a-half hours, plus one-and-a-half hours of interviews and 177 pages of text.
The Land Where The Blues Began, expanded, thirtieth-anniversary edition of the 1979 documentary by Alan Lomax and ethnomusicologist and civil rights activist Worth Long, with 3.5 hours of additional music and video.
[edit] See alsoJohn Lomax
[edit] Footnotes1.^ Collins described her arrival in America 1959 in an interview with Johan Kugelberg:
Kugelberg: Lomax met you?
Collins: He was on the dockside with Anne, his daughter. . . .. I think I arrived in April and I don't think we went south until August. It took quite a long time to get the money together; it kept falling through. I think Columbia was going to pay for it at one point, but they insisted he have a union engineer with him and someone extra like that—in situations we were going to be in would have been hopeless. So he refused, and they withdrew their funding. It was very last minute that the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic gave us the cash and we were gone within days of getting that money. Alan had wanted to do it earlier, but there was just no money to do it with. He had no money, ever. He was always living hand to mouth.
Kugelberg: That's the nature of somebody who is making the path as he's going along. Also as a sidebar, considering who the Ertegun brothers were at that point in time, it's surprising to me that they greenlighted that project at that point in time. I love that series, I think it's one of the great series of albums ever. It's surprising that Atlantic Records made that leap of faith because the series is sort of outside of their paradigm. So, those months were spent in New York?
Collins: We went to another place actually, we went to California, to the California Folk festival in Berkeley, this was sometime in the summer. And we stopped off in Chicago and stayed with Studs Terkel who was a hospitable man and his wonderful hospitable wife. Caught the train out to San Francisco from Chicago, which was an incredible experience. Sang at the Berkeley festival and met Jimmy Driftwood there for the first time. We all hit it off wonderfully.
Kugelberg: Your friends in England were dying of envy.
Collins: No, they didn't know. (Kugelberg, Johan. "Shirley Collins interview, part 2 of 5". furious.com. http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/shirleycollins2.html. Retrieved August 14, 2011. )
[edit] References1.^ Richard A. Reuss and JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957 (Lanham, Maryland, 2000), p. 122
2.^ See Matthew Barton and Andrew L. Kaye, in Ronald D. Cohen (ed), Alan Lomax Selected Writings, pp. 98–99
3.^ Alan Lomax and the Gaels
4.^ The Gatherer of Songs, November 2002, Tom McKean
5.^ Quoted in Ronald D. Cohen's Rainbow Quest, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, p. 140
6.^ Rogers, jude (March 21, 2008). "'You want no sheen, just the song'". guardian.co.uk. http://music.guardian.co.uk/folk/story/0,,2266935,00.html. Retrieved August 14, 2011.
7.^ Brian Eno, in liner notes to the Alan Lomax Collection Sampler (Rounder Records, 1997)
8.^ "About Cultural Equity". culturalequity.org. http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_about_ce.php. Retrieved August 14, 2011.
9.^ Ironically perhaps, the phrase originated in an article, later a best-selling 1943 book by Republican candidate Wendell Willkie.
10.^ "National Endowments for the Arts, National Heritage Fellowships 2008". www.nea.gov. 2008. http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/allheritage.html. Retrieved August 14, 2011.
11.^ On the vital connection between biological diversity and cultural diversity, see the article "In Defense of Difference: Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species" (Oct. 2008), published in Seed Magazine: "Last October, when United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released its Global Outlook 4 report, reiterating the scientific consensus that, ultimately, humans are to blame for current global extinctions, UNEP for the first time made an explicit connection between the ongoing collapse of biological diversity and the rapid, global-scale withering of cultural and linguistic diversity: 'Global social and economic change is driving the loss of biodiversity and disrupting local ways of life by promoting cultural assimilation and homogenization,' the report noted. 'Cultural change, such as loss of cultural and spiritual values, languages, and traditional knowledge and practices, is a driver that can cause increasing pressures on biodiversity...In turn, these pressures impact human well-being'".
12.^ a b c Ted Gioia,"The Red-rumor blues", Los Angeles Times, 23 April 2006.
13.^ See the Ann Burlak papers at the Archives of Smith College. Miss Berkman was defended by a lawyer from the International Labor Defense, the same organization that later defended the Scottsboro Boys. See "Edith Berkman Will Fight Deportation", Lewiston Daily Sun clip for July 29, 1931.
14.^ "Communists and suspected Communist", MI5 Security Services 4 release on George Orwell (September 2007).
15.^ Jon Pareles (2002-07-20). "Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice Of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87". NYT. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907E6DA1F39F933A15754C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1. Retrieved 2008-02-28.
16.^ See "The Culture of Haiti Comes to Life" on the Grammy website.
[edit] Further readingAlan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World . John Szwed., New York: Viking Press, 2010 (438 pp.: ISBN 978-0-670-02199-4) / London : William Heinemann, 2010 (438 pp.;ISBN 978-0-434-01232-9).
[edit] External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alan Lomax
"The Saga of a Folksong Hunter: A Twenty-year Odyssey with Cylinder, Disc, and Tape". HiFi Stereo Review, May 1960." 1960.
Alan Lomax Collection, The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
Lomax Collection images, Library of Congress
Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) - Alan Lomax pages
"Remembrances of Alan Lomax, 2002" by Guy Carawan
Alan Lomax: Citizen Activist, by Ron Cohen
Archived version of "Remembering Alan Lomax" by Bruce Jackson
Interview of Shirley Collins reminiscing about Alan Lomax on Perfect Sound Forever.
Alan Lomax's Multimedia Dream by Michael Naimark.
Alan Lomax on Impressum (in German)
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.
Scene taken from Lomax the songhunter, a musical documentary that travels the world to meet people whom Lomax recorded and portrays his life through interviews with relatives.
To Hear Your Banjo Play (1947), documentary film written by Alan Lomax, narrated by Pete Seeger, with Texas Gladden, Woody Guthrie, Baldwin Hawes, Cisco Houston, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, and the Margot Mayo Square Dancers (The American Square Dance Group) on Google video
Oss Oss Wee Oss by Alan Lomax and Peter Kennedy, a filmed documentary of the Padstow May Day Ceremony (1951) at Documentary Educational Resources.
Radio interview with Alan Lomax talking about Leadbelly.
The Man Who Recorded the World - New Biography by John Szwed | Folk Radio UK
Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records