Alan Lomax | |
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 Lomax at the Mountain Music Festival,Asheville, North Carolina, early 1940s. | |
| Background information | |
| Born | (1915-01-31)January 31, 1915 Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | July 19, 2002(2002-07-19) (aged 87) Safety Harbor, Florida, U.S. |
| Education | University of Texas at Austin (BA) |
| Occupation(s) | Folklorist,ethnomusicologist, musician |
| Part of a series on the |
| Anthropology of art, media,music,dance andfilm |
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| Social andcultural anthropology |
Alan Lomax (/ˈloʊmæks/; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an Americanethnomusicologist, best known for his numerousfield recordings offolk music during the 20th century. He was a musician,folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, filmmaker and son of folkloristJohn Lomax. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S. and in England which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries and helped start both theAmerican andBritish folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and especially the early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collectorJohn Lomax, and later, alone and with others. Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for theArchive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at theLibrary of Congress onaluminum andacetate discs.
After 1942, whenCongress terminated the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, Caribbean region, Italy, Spain, and United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. In March 2004, the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which "brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home."[1] With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to advocate for a public role for folklore,[2] 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 hisCantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 1980s, Lomax advised theSmithsonian Institution'sFolklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music,American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late 70s, Lomax completed the long-deferred memoirThe Land Where the Blues Began (1993), linking the birth of theblues todebt peonage,segregation, andforced labor in the American South.
Lomax's greatest legacy is in preserving and publishing recordings of musicians in many folk and blues traditions around the U.S. and Europe. Artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitaristRobert Johnson, protest singerWoody Guthrie, folk artistPete Seeger,country musicianBurl Ives,Scottish Gaelic singerFlora MacNeil, andcountry blues singersLead Belly andMuddy Waters, among many others. "Alan scraped by the whole time, and left with no money," said Don Fleming, director of Lomax's Association for Culture Equity. "He did it out of the passion he had for it, and found ways to fund projects that were closest to his heart".[3]
Lomax was born inAustin, Texas, in 1915,[4][5][6] the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneeringfolklorist and authorJohn A. Lomax. Two of his siblings also developed significant careers studying folklore:Bess Lomax Hawes andJohn Lomax Jr.
The elder Lomax, a former professor of English atTexas A&M University and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore andcowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of theUniversity of Texas.[7]
Due to childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, Lomax had mostly been home schooled in elementary school. InDallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys (a tiny prep school that later becameSt. Mark's School of Texas). Lomax excelled at Terrill and then transferred to the Choate School (nowChoate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut for a year, graduating eighth in his class at age 15 in 1930.[8]
Owing to his mother's declining health, however, rather than going toHarvard University as his father had wished, Lomax matriculated at theUniversity of Texas at Austin. A roommate, future anthropologistWalter Goldschmidt, recalled Lomax as "frighteningly smart, probably classifiable as a genius", though Goldschmidt remembers Lomax exploding one night while studying: "Damn it! The hardest thing I've had to learn is that I'm not a genius."[9] At the University of Texas, Lomax readNietzsche and developed an interest inphilosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper,The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control.[9]
At this time he also he began collecting"race" records and taking his dates to black-owned nightclubs, at the risk of expulsion. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sisterBess, age 10, was sent to live with an aunt. Although theGreat Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his second year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course inPlato and thePre-Socratics with University of Texas professor Albert P. Brogan.[10] He also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects.[11]
Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for theLibrary of Congress, co-authoringAmerican Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) andNegro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936).[6] His first field collecting without his father was done withZora Neale Hurston andMary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935. He returned to the University of Texas that fall and was awarded aBachelor of Arts in philosophy,[6] summa cum laude, and membership inPhi Beta Kappa in May 1936.[12] Lack of money prevented him from immediately attending graduate school at theUniversity of Chicago, as he desired, but he later corresponded with and pursued graduate studies withMelville J. Herskovits atColumbia University and withRay Birdwhistell at theUniversity of Pennsylvania.
Alan Lomax marriedElizabeth Harold Goodman, then a student at the University of Texas, in February 1937.[13] They were married for 12 years and had a daughter,Anne (later known as Anna). Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over theBBC Home Service as part of the war effort.
During the 1950s, after she and Lomax divorced, she conducted lengthy interviews for Lomax with folk music personalities, includingVera Ward Hall and theReverend Gary Davis. Lomax also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1935);[14] withJohn Wesley Work III and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts[15] andJean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean (1961); withShirley Collins in Great Britain and the Southeastern U.S. (1959); withJoan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter.[16] 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, films, and publications.[14]
From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of theLibrary of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings.[17] A pioneering oral historian, Lomax recorded substantial interviews with many folk, blues, andjazz musicians, includingWoody Guthrie,Lead Belly,Jelly Roll Morton, andBig Bill Broonzy. On one of his trips in 1941, he went toClarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record the music ofRobert Johnson. When he arrived, he was told by locals that Johnson had died, but that another local musician,Muddy Waters, might be willing to record his music for Lomax. Using recording equipment that filled the trunk of his car, Lomax recorded Waters' music; it is said that hearing Lomax's recording was the motivation that Waters needed to leave his farm job in Mississippi to pursue a career as a blues musician full-time, first inMemphis and later inChicago.[18]
As part of this work, Lomax traveled through Michigan and Wisconsin in 1938 to record and document the traditional music of that region. Over four hundred recordings from this collection are now available at the Library of Congress. "He traveled in a 1935Plymouth sedan, toting a Presto instantaneous disc recorder and a movie camera. And when he returned nearly three months later, having driven thousands of miles on barely paved roads, it was with a cache of 250 discs and 8 reels of film, documents of the incredible range of ethnic diversity, expressive traditions, and occupational folklife in Michigan."[19]
In late 1939, Lomax hosted two series on CBS's nationally broadcastAmerican School of the Air, calledAmerican Folk Song andWellsprings of Music, both music appreciation courses that aired daily in the schools and were supposed to highlight links between American folk and classical orchestral music. As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, includingBurl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly,Pete Seeger,Josh White, and theGolden Gate Quartet. The individual programs reached ten million students in 200,000 U.S. classrooms and were also broadcast in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, but both Lomax and his father felt that the concept of the shows, which portrayed folk music as mere raw material for orchestral music, was deeply flawed and failed to do justice to vernacular culture.
In 1940, under Lomax's supervision, RCA made two groundbreaking suites of commercial folk music recordings: Woody Guthrie'sDust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly'sThe Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs.[20] Though they did not sell especially well when released, Lomax's biographerJohn Szwed calls these "some of the first concept albums".[21]
In 1940, Lomax and his close friendNicholas Ray wrote and produced the 15-minute programBack Where I Came From, which aired three nights per week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically. Its racially integrated cast included Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Josh White,Sonny Terry, andBrownie McGhee. In February 1941, Lomax spoke and gave a demonstration of his program along with talks byNelson Rockefeller from thePan American Union, and the president of theAmerican Museum of Natural History, at a global conference in Mexico of a thousand broadcasters CBS had sponsored to launch its worldwide programming initiative.Eleanor Roosevelt invited Lomax toHyde Park.[22]
Despite its success and high visibility,Back Where I Come From never picked up a commercial sponsor. The show ran for only twenty-one weeks before it was suddenly canceled in February 1941.[23] On hearing the news, Woody Guthrie wrote Lomax from California, "Too honest again, I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it can't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."[24] Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development."[25]
On December 8, 1941, as "Assistant in Charge at the Library of Congress", he sent telegrams to fieldworkers in ten different localities across the United States, asking them to collect reactions of ordinary Americans to thebombing of Pearl Harbor the prior day and the subsequent declaration of war by the United States. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President", was recorded in January and February 1942.[26]
While serving in theUnited States Army inWorld War II, Lomax produced and hosted numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera",The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the U.S.) by theBBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie,Will Geer,Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, andFiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released onRounder Records in 2000.[27]
In the late 1940s, Lomax produced a series of commercial folk music albums forDecca Records and organized a series of concerts at New York'sTown Hall andCarnegie Hall, featuring blues,calypso, andflamenco music. He also hosted a radio show,Your Ballad Man, in 1949 that was broadcast nationwide on theMutual Radio Network and featured a highly eclectic program, such asgamelan music;Django Reinhardt;klezmer music;Sidney Bechet;Wild Bill Davison; jazzy pop songs byMaxine Sullivan andJo Stafford; readings of the poetry ofCarl Sandburg;hillbilly music with electric guitars; and Finnish brass bands.[28] He also was a key participant in theV.D. Radio Project in 1949, creating a number of "ballad dramas" featuring country and gospel superstars, includingRoy Acuff, Woody Guthrie,Hank Williams, andSister Rosetta Tharpe (among others), that aimed to convince men and women suffering from syphilis to seek treatment.[29]
In December 1949, a newspaper printed a story, "Red Convictions Scare'Travelers'", that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. The article mentioned Alan Lomax as one of the sponsors of the dinner, along withC. B. Baldwin, campaign manager forHenry A. Wallace in 1948; music criticOlin Downes ofThe New York Times; andW. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom it accused of being members of Communist front groups.[30] The following June,Red Channels, a pamphlet edited by former F.B.I. agents which became the basis for theentertainment industry blacklist of the 1950s, listed Lomax as an artist or broadcast journalist sympathetic to Communism. (Others listed includedAaron Copland,Leonard Bernstein,Yip Harburg,Lena Horne,Langston Hughes,Burl Ives,Dorothy Parker,Pete Seeger, andJosh White.) That summer, Congress was debating theMcCarran Act, which required the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies",[31] while theHouse Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings. Feeling sure that the Act would pass and realizing that his career in broadcasting was in jeopardy, Lomax, who was newly divorced and already had an agreement withGoddard Lieberson ofColumbia Records to record in Europe,[32] hastened to renew his passport, cancel his speaking engagements, and plan for his departure, telling his agent he hoped to return in January "if things cleared up". He set sail on September 24, 1950, on board the steamerRMS Mauretania. Sure enough, in October, FBI agents were interviewing Lomax's friends and acquaintances. Lomax never told his family exactly why he went to Europe, only that he was developing a library of world folk music for Columbia. Nor did he allow anyone to say he was forced to leave. In a letter to the editor of a British newspaper, Lomax took a writer to task for describing him as a "victim ofwitch-hunting," insisting that he was in the UK only to work on his Columbia Project.[33]
Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volumeColumbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly invented LP records. He spent seven months in Spain, where, in addition to recording three thousand items from most of the regions of Spain, he made copious notes and took hundreds of photos of "not only singers and musicians but anything that interested him – empty streets, old buildings, and country roads", bringing to these photos, "a concern for form and composition that went beyond the ethnographic to the artistic".[34] He drew a parallel between photography and field recording:
Recording folk songs works like a candid cameraman. I hold the mike, use my hand for shading volume. It's a big problem in Spain because there is so much emotional excitement, noise all around. Empathy is most important in field work. It's necessary to put your hand on the artist while he sings. They have to react to you. Even if they're mad at you, it's better than nothing.[34]
When Columbia Records producerGeorge Avakian gave jazz arrangerGil Evans a copy of the Spanish World Library LP,Miles Davis and Evans were "struck by the beauty of pieces such as the 'Saeta', recorded in Seville, and a panpiper's tune ('Alborada de Vigo') from Galicia, and worked them into the 1960 albumSketches of Spain."[35]
For the Scottish, English, and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folkloristsPeter Douglas Kennedy, Scots poetHamish Henderson, and with the Irish folkloristSéamus Ennis,[36] recording among others,Margaret Barry and the songs in Irish ofElizabeth Cronin; Scots ballad singerJeannie Robertson; andHarry Cox of Norfolk, England, and interviewing some of these performers at length about their lives. In 1953 a youngDavid Attenborough commissioned Lomax to host six 20-minute episodes of the BBC TV seriesThe Song Hunter, which featured performances by a wide range of traditional musicians from all over Britain and Ireland, as well as Lomax himself.[37] In 1957, Lomax hosted a folk music show on BBC's Home Service titledA Ballad Hunter and organized askiffle group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who includedEwan MacColl,Peggy Seeger, andShirley Collins), which appeared on British television. His ballad operaBig Rock Candy Mountain premiered December 1955 atJoan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and featuredRamblin' Jack Elliot. In Scotland, Lomax is credited with being an inspiration for theSchool of Scottish Studies, founded in 1951, the year of his first visit there.[38][39]
Lomax andDiego Carpitella's survey ofItalian folk music for theColumbia World Library, conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and theAccademia Nazionale 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, at Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singerJimmy Driftwood; theSelah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups);Muddy Waters andMemphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass);Pete Seeger,Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); andthe 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 toIzzy 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."[40]
Alan Lomax had met 20-year-old English folk singerShirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained a contract fromAtlantic Records to re-record some of the American musicians first recorded in the 1940s, using improved equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states, known colloquially as theSouthern Journey, lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such asAlmeda Riddle,Hobart Smith,Wade Ward,Charlie Higgins andBessie Jones and culminated in the discovery ofFred McDowell. Recordings from this trip were issued under the titleSounds of theSouth and some were also featured in the Coen brothers' 2000 filmO Brother, Where Art Thou?. Lomax wished to marry Collins but when the recording trip was over, she returned to England and marriedAustin John Marshall. In an interview inThe Guardian newspaper, Collins expressed irritation thatThe Land Where The Blues Began, Lomax's 1993 account of the journey, 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".[41] Collins addressed the perceived omission in her memoir,America Over the Water, published in 2004.[42][43]
Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961. They separated the following year and divorced in 1967.[44]
In 1962, Lomax and singer and civil rights activistGuy Carawan, music director at theHighlander Folk School inMonteagle, Tennessee, produced the albumFreedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961–62 for theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee onVanguard Records.
Lomax was a consultant toCarl Sagan for theVoyager 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 ofBlind Willie Johnson,Louis Armstrong, andChuck Berry; Andean panpipes andNavajo chants; Azerbaijanimugham performed by two balaban players,[45] aSicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from theMbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria byValya Balkanska;[46] in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more. Sagan later wrote that it was Lomax "who was a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music. He brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections because Azerbaijanis play bagpipe-sounding instruments [balaban] and Peruvians play panpipes and such exquisite pieces had been recorded by ethnomusicologists known to Lomax."[47]
Alan Lomax died inSafety Harbor, Florida, on July 19, 2002, at the age of 87.[48]
The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.[49]
Folklore can show us that this dream is age-old and common to all mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker peoples in sharing this dream. And it can make their adjustment to a world society an easier and more creative process. The stuff of folklore—the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, "You are my brother."[50]
As a member of thePopular Front andPeople's Songs in the 1940s, Alan Lomax promoted what was then known as "One World" and today is calledmulticulturalism.[51] 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 1940s and 1950s 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 anthropologistBronisław 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 asRichard Dorson, objected that scholars shouldn't act as cultural arbiters, but Lomax believed it was 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 byBenjamin Botkin, Harold W. Thompson, andLouis 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 bypublic 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.[52]
In 1983, Lomax foundedThe Association for Cultural Equity (ACE). It is housed at the Fine Arts Campus of Hunter College in New York City and is the custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive. The Association's mission is to "facilitate cultural equity" and practice "cultural feedback" and "preserve, publish, repatriate and freely disseminate" its collections.[53] Though Alan Lomax's appeals to anthropology conferences and repeated letters to UNESCO fell on deaf ears, the modern world seems to have caught up to his vision. In an article first published in the 2009Louisiana Folklore Miscellany,Barry Jean Ancelet, folklorist and chair of the Modern Languages Department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, wrote:
Every time [Lomax] called me over a span of about ten years, he never failed to ask if we were teachingCajun French in the schools yet. His notions about the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity have been affirmed by many contemporary scholars, including Nobel Prize-winning physicistMurray Gell-Mann who concluded his recent book,The Quark and the Jaguar, with a discussion of these very same issues, insisting on the importance of "cultural DNA" (1994: 338–343). His cautions about "universal popular culture" (1994: 342) sound remarkably like Alan's warning in his "Appeal for Cultural Equity" that the "cultural grey-out" must be checked or there would soon be "no place worth visiting and no place worth staying" (1972). Compare Gell-Mann:
Just as it is crazy to squander in a few decades much of the rich biological diversity that has evolved over billions of years, so is it equally crazy to permit the disappearance of much of human cultural diversity, which has evolved in a somewhat analogous way over many tens of thousands of years...The erosion of local cultural patterns around the world is not, however, entirely or even principally the result of contact with the universalizing effect of scientific enlightenment. Popular culture is in most cases far more effective at erasing distinctions between one place or society and another. Blue jeans, fast food, rock music, and American television serials have been sweeping the world for years. (1994: 338–343)
and Lomax:
carcasses of dead or dying cultures on the human landscape, that we have learned to dismiss this pollution of the human environment as inevitable, and even sensible, since it is wrongly assumed that the weak and unfit among musics and cultures are eliminated in this way...Not only is such a doctrine anti-human; it is very bad science. It is false Darwinism applied to culture – especially to its expressive systems, such as music language, and art. Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels...With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it livable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need. The only way to halt this degradation of man's culture is to commit ourselves to the principles of political, social, and economic justice. (2003 [1972]: 286)[54]
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,[55] ideas remarkably similar to those forcefully articulated by Alan Lomax many years before.
From 1942 to 1979, Lomax repeatedly was investigated and interviewed by theFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but nothing incriminating was discovered, and the investigation was abandoned. Scholar and jazz pianistTed Gioia uncovered and published extracts from Alan Lomax's 800-page FBI files.[56] 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'scommunist sympathies. Looking for leads, the FBI seized on the fact that, at the age of 17 in 1932 while attending Harvard University for a year, Lomax had been arrested in Boston, Massachusetts in connection with a political demonstration. In 1942 the FBI sent agents to interview students at Harvard's freshman dormitory about Lomax's participation in a demonstration that had occurred at Harvard ten years earlier in support of the immigration rights of one Edith Berkman, a Jewish woman, dubbed the "red flame" for herlabor organizing activities among the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and threatened with deportation as an alleged "Communist agitator".[57] Lomax had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined $25. 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.[56]
Lomax left Harvard, after having spent his sophomore year there, to join John A. Lomax and John Lomax, Jr. in collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress and to assist his father in writing his books. In withdrawing him (in addition to not being able to afford the tuition), the elder Lomax had probably wanted to separate his son from new political associates that he considered undesirable. But Alan had also not been happy there and probably also wanted to be nearer his bereaved[citation needed] father and young sister,Bess, and to return to the close friends he had made during his first year at the University of Texas.
In June 1942 the FBI approached the Librarian of Congress,Archibald McLeish, in an attempt 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 theMississippi Delta on behalf of the Library, where he made landmark recordings of Muddy Waters,Son House, andDavid "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 ofPeople's Songs, was in charge of campaign music forHenry A. Wallace's 1948 Presidential run on theProgressive Party ticket on a platform opposing the arms race and supportingcivil rights for Jews and African Americans. Subsequently, Lomax was one of the performers listed in the publicationRed Channels as a possible Communist sympathizer and was consequently blacklisted from working in U.S. entertainment industries.
A 2007 BBC news article revealed that in the early 1950s, the BritishMI5 had placed 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 directorJoseph Losey is also mentioned (serial 30a).[58]
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."[56]
The FBI investigation was concluded the following year, shortly after Lomax's 65th birthday.
Alan Lomax received theNational Medal of Arts from PresidentRonald Reagan in 1986; aLibrary of Congress Living Legend Award[59] in 2000; and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from Tulane University in 2001. He won theNational Book Critics Circle Award and theRalph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1993 for his bookThe 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 posthumousGrammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 2003.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 February 8, 2006[60]Alan Lomax in Haiti: Recordings For The Library Of Congress, 1936–1937, issued by Harte Records and made with the support and major funding from Kimberley Green and the Green foundation, and featuring 10 CDs of recorded music and film footage (shot by Elizabeth Lomax, then nineteen), a bound book of Lomax's selected letters and field journals, and notes by musicologist Gage Averill, was nominated for twoGrammy Awards in 2011.[61]
Brian Eno wrote of Lomax's later recording career in his notes to accompany an anthology of Lomax's world recordings:
[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.[62]
In January 2012, theAmerican Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that it would release Lomax's vast archive in digital form. Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project he called theGlobal Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs.[63] By February 2012, 17,000 music tracks from his archived collection were expected to be made available for free streaming, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.[64]
As of March 2012 this has been accomplished. Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online.[65][66] This is material from Alan Lomax's independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by the Association for Cultural Equity. This is "distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection – which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax's prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) – is the provenance of the American Folklife Center"[65] at the Library of Congress.
TheLomax Kentucky Recordings, a collaborative project from the Association for Cultural Equity,Berea College, The Library of Congress, and the University of Kentucky, highlights and contextualizes a subset of documentary sound recordings focused on rural Kentucky music and lore.
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On August 24, 1997, at a concert at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia,Bob Dylan said about Lomax, who had helped introduce him to folk music and whom he had known as a young man inGreenwich Village:
There is a distinguished gentlemen here who came...I want to introduce him – named Alan Lomax. I don't know if many of you have heard of him [Audience applause.] Yes, he's here, he's made a trip out to see me. I used to know him years ago. I learned a lot there and Alan...Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we've got anybody to thank, it's Alan. Thanks, Alan.[67]
In 1999 electronica musicianMoby released his fifth albumPlay. It extensively used samples from field recordings collected by Lomax on the 1993 box setSounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta.[68] The album went on to be certifiedplatinum in more than 20 countries.[69]
In his autobiographyChronicles, Part One, Bob Dylan recollects a 1961 scene: "There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies—French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to go to America, go to Greenwich Village."[70]
Lomax is portrayed by actorNorbert Leo Butz inA Complete Unknown, the 2024 feature film about Bob Dylan's early career.[71]
A partial list of books by Alan Lomax includes:
(Kugelberg, Johan."Shirley Collins interview, part 2 of 5". furious.com.Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. RetrievedAugust 14, 2011.)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 withStuds 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.
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