Biography
Alan Lomax ranks among the most influential champions of America's folk music heritage. Traveling rural routes, taverns, and labor sites throughout the southern United States, he recovered an extensive collection of songs and performers, preserving the expressions of everyday people so later audiences could encounter them. His groundbreaking fieldwork ensured that traditions such as Delta blues, Appalachian folk, and field hollers remain vibrant, while his recordings supply a vivid record of eras and communities that would otherwise have faded.
Born January 31, 1915, in Austin, Texas, as the son of distinguished folklorist John A. Lomax—the country's foremost collector of cowboy songs—he began assisting his father on gathering expeditions from an early age. When John received a contract in 1932 to compile a volume of folk songs, he and Alan acquired a rudimentary recording device funded by the Library of Congress; in four months they covered roughly 16,000 miles across the southeastern states and assembled numerous African-American work songs, many captured inside penitentiaries. One of the artists they met that summer was Louisiana inmate Huddie Ledbetter, whom they helped free and then hired as a driver while producing his initial recordings. Ledbetter later achieved renown as Lead Belly and endures as a central figure in American folk and blues.
From 1933 through 1942, Alan recorded folk and traditional music for the Library of Congress across the Deep South as well as in New England, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, and Ohio, sometimes alone and sometimes with his father, writer Zora Neale Hurston, musicologist John Work, or additional collaborators. He also worked in Haiti and the Bahamas, laying early groundwork for the systematic study of world music that expanded in later decades, and captured the first recordings of Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Aunt Molly Jackson. During the same span the Lomaxes collaborated on several volumes, among them 1934's American Ballads and Folksongs, 1936's Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, 1937's Cowboy Songs, and 1938's Our Singing Country.
In 1938 Lomax shifted focus to jazz, amassing more than eight hours of vocals, instrumentals, and spoken reminiscences from one of its originators, Jelly Roll Morton. The following year he introduced "American Folk Songs," a twenty-six-week historical survey aired within the CBS series American School of the Air, and went on to write and direct additional wartime broadcasts. In 1946 he convened Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Big Bill Broonzy to examine the roots and outlook of the blues; those sessions appeared in 1959 as Blues in the Mississippi Night. He spent the rest of the decade collecting prison songs in Mississippi and in 1948 served as host and writer for the Mutual Broadcasting Network program On Top of Old Smokey.
Lomax moved to England in 1950 and stayed for most of the decade, documenting traditional music of the British Isles; those recordings formed the foundation of the ten-disc 1961 series Folksongs of Great Britain. He also conducted extensive fieldwork in Spain and Italy during the same period. Returning to the United States in 1959, he promptly undertook another southern expedition that yielded, among others, bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. A year later he released the book Folk Songs of North America. A six-month Caribbean journey followed in 1962, during which he recorded traditional musics of English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking communities as well as the Hindu culture of Trinidad. In 1967 he joined Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger on Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People; Folk Song Style and Culture, drawn from his worldwide research, appeared the next year.
New recording technologies expanded his reach, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s he returned repeatedly to the South to videotape traditional performances for the PBS series American Patchwork, which reached completion and aired in 1990. Simultaneously he advanced the Global Jukebox, an interactive software project described as an "intelligent museum," and completed 1993's The Land Where the Blues Began, which received a National Book Award. From the 1990s onward, Rounder Records progressively reissued a projected 100-CD series of his landmark field recordings, introducing fresh listeners to his contributions in ethnomusicology. Lomax maintained an active schedule of lecturing, writing, and work with the Association for Cultural Equity until his death at age 87 on July 19, 2002. His meticulous documentation of global musical cultures continues to inform and enrich audiences for generations ahead.
Born January 31, 1915, in Austin, Texas, as the son of distinguished folklorist John A. Lomax—the country's foremost collector of cowboy songs—he began assisting his father on gathering expeditions from an early age. When John received a contract in 1932 to compile a volume of folk songs, he and Alan acquired a rudimentary recording device funded by the Library of Congress; in four months they covered roughly 16,000 miles across the southeastern states and assembled numerous African-American work songs, many captured inside penitentiaries. One of the artists they met that summer was Louisiana inmate Huddie Ledbetter, whom they helped free and then hired as a driver while producing his initial recordings. Ledbetter later achieved renown as Lead Belly and endures as a central figure in American folk and blues.
From 1933 through 1942, Alan recorded folk and traditional music for the Library of Congress across the Deep South as well as in New England, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, and Ohio, sometimes alone and sometimes with his father, writer Zora Neale Hurston, musicologist John Work, or additional collaborators. He also worked in Haiti and the Bahamas, laying early groundwork for the systematic study of world music that expanded in later decades, and captured the first recordings of Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Aunt Molly Jackson. During the same span the Lomaxes collaborated on several volumes, among them 1934's American Ballads and Folksongs, 1936's Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, 1937's Cowboy Songs, and 1938's Our Singing Country.
In 1938 Lomax shifted focus to jazz, amassing more than eight hours of vocals, instrumentals, and spoken reminiscences from one of its originators, Jelly Roll Morton. The following year he introduced "American Folk Songs," a twenty-six-week historical survey aired within the CBS series American School of the Air, and went on to write and direct additional wartime broadcasts. In 1946 he convened Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Big Bill Broonzy to examine the roots and outlook of the blues; those sessions appeared in 1959 as Blues in the Mississippi Night. He spent the rest of the decade collecting prison songs in Mississippi and in 1948 served as host and writer for the Mutual Broadcasting Network program On Top of Old Smokey.
Lomax moved to England in 1950 and stayed for most of the decade, documenting traditional music of the British Isles; those recordings formed the foundation of the ten-disc 1961 series Folksongs of Great Britain. He also conducted extensive fieldwork in Spain and Italy during the same period. Returning to the United States in 1959, he promptly undertook another southern expedition that yielded, among others, bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. A year later he released the book Folk Songs of North America. A six-month Caribbean journey followed in 1962, during which he recorded traditional musics of English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking communities as well as the Hindu culture of Trinidad. In 1967 he joined Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger on Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People; Folk Song Style and Culture, drawn from his worldwide research, appeared the next year.
New recording technologies expanded his reach, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s he returned repeatedly to the South to videotape traditional performances for the PBS series American Patchwork, which reached completion and aired in 1990. Simultaneously he advanced the Global Jukebox, an interactive software project described as an "intelligent museum," and completed 1993's The Land Where the Blues Began, which received a National Book Award. From the 1990s onward, Rounder Records progressively reissued a projected 100-CD series of his landmark field recordings, introducing fresh listeners to his contributions in ethnomusicology. Lomax maintained an active schedule of lecturing, writing, and work with the Association for Cultural Equity until his death at age 87 on July 19, 2002. His meticulous documentation of global musical cultures continues to inform and enrich audiences for generations ahead.
Albums
