Lomax, Alan (1915-2002), was an American musicologist who devoted his life to collecting and recording folk music throughout the world. Lomax was responsible for early recordings of such American folk music stars as Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, and Muddy Waters.
During the 1930’s and 1940’s, Lomax took primitive recording equipment into the rural American South to capture the original performances of blues and folk singers. Lomax also recorded gospel choirs, jazz musicians, and Cajun singers. He accumulated thousands of songs and supervised dozens of recordings. Lomax wrote, directed, and produced documentary films about folk music as well as an award-winning television series called “American Patchwork” (1990). Starting in the late 1980’s, he began building a multimedia database called “The Global Jukebox” that explores the relationship between human history and song and dance.
Lomax wrote many articles and books about folk music and recorded several albums as a folk singer. During the early 1950’s, Lomax added photography to his activities. He took pictures of folk performances during field recording trips to Spain, Italy, the Caribbean, and the American South. The photos preserve a world of folk music that has largely vanished.
Lomax was born on Jan. 31, 1915, in Austin, Texas. He began his career as a teen-ager accompanying his father, John Avery Lomax, on field trips through the South to record folk music. From 1937 to 1942, Alan Lomax was assistant in charge of American folk music archives at the Library of Congress. During the 1940’s, he was the host of several radio programs that featured folk music. Lomax edited the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music for Columbia Records from 1950 to 1958. He also worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 1950 to 1958 as a producer and writer. His research stimulated a British folk music revival that had a strong influence on British popular music, including British rock.
Lomax’s first book was American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), written with his father. Lomax also wrote The Land Where the Blues Began (1993), a memoir. Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997 was published in 2003, after his death on July 19, 2002.
See also Leadbelly ; Morton, Jelly Roll .
