Musicologist Alan Lomax Dies

Associated Press | July 19, 2002 | POLLY ANDERSON

[HAL9000]

NEW YORK (AP) - Alan Lomax, the celebrated musicologist who helped preserve America's and the world's heritage by making thousands of recordings of folk, blues and jazz musicians from the 1930s onward, died Friday. He was 87.

Lomax died at Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Fla., according to Lisa Kissinger of Vinson Funeral Home. He had moved from New York in 1996 to the Tampa area.

He was the son of folklorist John A. Lomax, whose 1910 book "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads" was a pioneering work in the field of music preservation. Among the famous songs it saved for posterity was "Home on the Range."

Two songs from the younger Lomax's collection were featured on the 2000 Grammy-winning soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Alan Lomax was still in his teens when he began assisting his father's efforts to interview and record musicians of almost every stripe.

Long before tape recording became feasible, the work entailed lugging around recording equipment that weighed hundreds of pounds.

Lomax said making it possible to record and play back music in remote areas "gave a voice to the voiceless" and "put neglected cultures and silenced people into the communications chain."

Among the famous musicians recorded by the Lomaxes were Woodie Guthrie; Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly; "Jelly Roll" Morton; Muddy Waters; and Son House.

Much of their work was done for the Library of Congress ( news - web sites), where the Archive of American Folk Song had been established in 1928.

Some of the music that seemed exotic in the '30s had a profound influence on the development of rock 'n' roll. In "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll," critic Robert Palmer wrote about a black religious "ring shout" song, "Run Old Jeremiah," recorded by the Lomaxes in a tiny rural church in 1934.

"The rhythmic singing, the hard-driving beat, the bluesy melody and the improvised, stream-of-consciousness words of this particular shout ... all anticipate key aspects of rock & roll as it would emerge some 20 years later," Palmer wrote.

As interest in folklore and minority groups' culture has grown in recent decades, experts and fans alike have been able to draw upon the recordings made so long ago.

When interest in Cajun music and its cousin, zydeco, exploded in the 1980s, for example, a two-album set of the Lomaxes' recordings from the 1930s was issued.

The Lomaxes "were recording people who were old then, and taking machines to houses and recording home music," Louisiana folklore expert Barry Ancelet, who edited the album, said in 1988.

Lomax recalled the Louisiana recording sessions vividly.

"At the time, it was wonderful, but simply bewildering. All these new kinds of songs were simply mysteries," Lomax said. Citing one song with a particularly complex rhythm, he said, "When I recorded it, there had been nothing like it in America before."

In 1994, his book "The Land Where the Blues Began" won the National Book Critics Circle award for most distinguished nonfiction of 1993. It documented the stories, musicians and listeners behind blues music.

In 1990, Lomax's five-part documentary series "American Patchwork" was shown on PBS, exploring such topics as the blues, Cajun culture and the British roots of Appalachian music.

The final episode, "Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old," featured elderly balladeers and musicians who pass their music to the young.

"It's not preservation, it's process," Lomax said. "It's keeping things going."

In his research, Lomax would photograph the musicians and record their thoughts as well as their tunes, asking them where they learned the songs and what the songs meant to them.

The 1994 off-Broadway show "Jelly Roll!" as well as the book "Mister Jelly Roll" were based in part on Lomax's 1938 interviews with Morton.

Lomax didn't limit his efforts to the United States, doing extensive work in Spain, Italy, Britain and the Caribbean. He worked to compile a world survey of folk songs, which deepened the understanding of the links between peoples.

Lomax believed our centralized electronic communications system is imposing "standardized, mass-produced and cheapened cultures everywhere."

"If those absolutely important things are ignored, of how we speciated, how we adapted to the planet, then we're going to lose something precious," he told The Associated Press in 1990. "There won't be anywhere to go and no place to come home to."

___

On the Net:

http://www.alan-lomax.com

[dennisw]

bttttt

[Chad Fairbanks]

I've always thought it was pretty cool what this guy and his father did... and I also agree with the idea that mass-produced, instant media cheapens and stifles creativity...

:0)

[freemama]

He may be gone, but the history he preserved will remain.

[zarf]

A Huge Loss. ....he brought it all to the fore and treated American folk culture with the respect and dignity it deserved. I just purchased his Sounds Of The South compilation.....tremendous!!

God Bless him, America and the World owe Mr. Lomax a tip of the cap.

[TheOtherOne]

Thanks for the post - I will just add this:

Alan Lomax: The Most Important Musical Figure You Never Heard Of
By Ted Anthony Associated Press Writer
Published: Jul 20, 2002

He was an adventurer with boundless energy, scouring mountains and back roads for authentic American voices and carrying them home to the city, where performers with names like Guthrie and Seeger and Dylan listened - and changed forever the way the country listened to music.

Unless you're in the record business or the folklore business, odds are you never heard of Alan Lomax. But it would be nearly impossible to find, anywhere, an American citizen untouched by his decades of work seeking out and popularizing the music of the masses.

Lomax, who died Friday at 87, was the popularizer of popularizers - a man who believed the American folk tradition was something to be preserved, passed on to the future in an age when technology and faster-paced lives were threatening to swallow it up.

And so he did, by the thousands, one song at a time.

Delta blues, Appalachian ballads, New Orleans jazz, English bawdy songs - Lomax was hungry for them all. Wherever they were sung, he and his bulky equipment were there, long before interstate highways and air travel made remote places accessible.

At first, he worked with his father, John Avery Lomax, a patriarch of folk-music collecting. Then he worked for the Library of Congress, nearly doubling their folk-music archive. He hosted radio shows, issued records, compiled folk songs into books and credited the men and women who had provided his bounty.

Lomax hit the road with his father in 1933, when he was 18. They traversed the south, stopping at prison farms, sawmills, general stores, anywhere people might be willing to share their very personal music with strangers - no easy task for an outsider, especially one from back east.

In these remote villages and settlements and patch towns, the Lomaxes found people still singing the songs their parents taught them, songs whose lives stretched back to the 19th, 18th, 17th centuries - and even across the sea back to England or Ireland or, in the case of the blues, West Africa.

By 1937, Lomax was embarking on his own trips. He set out for a wild, mountainous expanse of eastern Kentucky that few outsiders ever visited. In the car was his Presto reproducer, a needle-driven recorder that captured songs on heavy, fragile acetate disks. He was 22.

It was a bumpy trip. Battery cells went dead. He ran out of blanks. One county had received power just before he arrived; others lacked electricity entirely. One man attempted to stab Lomax, convinced the song collector was making moves on his wife.

But the excursion was fruitful, producing 228 new songs - like "Rising Sun Blues," which would become popular within a few years as "House of the Rising Sun." Even the not-so-memorable songs were viewed by Lomax with affection.

"I have made so far 32 records, some of them quite marvelous, some of them mediocre, but all necessary," he wired Washington from Harlan, Ky., in September 1937.

Collecting was only half of the Lomax hourglass. The sand flowed through to the bottom when he went home and assumed his role as popularizer.

A ubiquitous part of the New York City folk scene of the early 1940s, Lomax passed the songs he had collected to the musicians who would later become cornerstones of the Folk Revival. Among those who adopted Lomax finds: Lead Belly, whom Lomax's father had "discovered" in a Louisiana prison, Woody Guthrie and the young Pete Seeger.

It was a heady time to be a folk musician. Politics - leftist, populist politics - had given many a sense of purpose. Performers needed material that echoed of the masses, and Lomax was thrilled to provide it.

"He purposely tried his best to infect us with these songs," Pete Seeger recalled years later. Through people like Seeger and his Weavers a tide of roots music began to build into the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

"One of the reasons we had a folk revival in this country was that Alan Lomax could recognize those qualities in a song that could make someone 1,000 miles from Kentucky want to sing them," Matt Barton, head of the Lomax Archives in New York City, said in a 2000 interview.

Not everyone appreciated Lomax. His abrasiveness alienated some of his contemporaries. His politics disgusted others and, in the early 1950s, contributed to his seven-year trip to England. Others criticized him as they had his father for compiling "composites" of folk songs - taking versions from several people and blending them into one.

Lomax said it boiled down to putting "neglected cultures and silenced people into the communications chain." His subjects still recall, years later, how exciting it was when he played back the recordings he had just made and they heard themselves play.

What Alan Lomax did was, in a way, inherently contradictory. He was terrified that recorded sound would eradicate the folk-singing tradition. Who needed to sing when you could play a record?

And yet Lomax used the very instrument he feared to accomplish his goals. And in large part because of him, that music managed to be preserved even as it changed.

Today, any American can visit the Library of Congress and hear the voices of miners and railroad men and grandmothers and itinerant balladeers who sang long ago into machines long gone. Yesterday's America, today's ears.

Lomax put it this way in a 1940 radio script: "The essence of what makes America lies not in the headlined heroes ... but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies."

Alan Lomax, who used technology to give voice to the voiceless, is silent now. But the voices he preserved? In the records of yesterday and the music of today, we are hearing them still.

AP-ES-07-20-02 1504EDT

[dennisw]

July 20, 2002
Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
By JON PARELES


lan Lomax, the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.

Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.

Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called "cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom."

Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.

"What Caruso was to singing, Alan Lomax is to musicology," the oral historian Studs Terkel said in 1997. "He is a key figure in 20th-century culture."

In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as "a missionary."

Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. "It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom," he once said. "I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence."

To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.

"The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them," Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, "were just as good as anybody else."

Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.

"The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances," Mr. Lomax recalled. "There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce."

Discovering the Greats

One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums "Negro Sinful Songs" in 1939 and "The Midnight Special," prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song "Goodnight Irene," and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.

Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, "Mister Jelly Roll," which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.

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

In 1997, Rounder Records began issuing its Alan Lomax Collection, a series of more than 100 CD's of music recorded by Mr. Lomax in the deep South, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, the British Isles, Spain and Italy. A recording Mr. Lomax made in Mississippi in 1959 of a prisoner, James Carter, singing the work song "Po' Lazarus," opens the multimillion-selling, Grammy Award-winning soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (Universal).

From Harvard to Texas Mr. Lomax was born in Austin, Tex., in 1915. He attended Choate and spent a year at Harvard. But in 1933, he left to enroll at the University of Texas, where he graduated in 1936 with a degree in philosophy. Later, he did graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University. He had already become a folk-music collector, recording songs with his father.

"My father was fired from the University of Texas for recording those dirty old cowboy songs," Mr. Lomax said. "Cowboys were lowdown, flea-ridden and boozing, so a guy who associated with them — even though he romanticized them a lot, as my father did — was looked down on."

The Lomaxes' book "American Ballads and Folk Songs" was published in 1934, followed by "Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly" (1936), "Cowboy Songs" (1937), "Our Singing Country" (1938) and "Folk Songs: USA" (1946). John A. Lomax became the curator of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress; his son joined him there as assistant director in 1937.

By the end of the 1930's, John and Alan Lomax had recorded more than 3,000 songs on 78-r.p.m. discs. Generations have grown up with these Library of Congress recordings.

A Life on the Road

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

His recordings would include interviews with the performers. He was determined to preserve not only the music, but also the stories behind the songs and the vanishing communities that produced them.

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

Mr. Lomax began a weekly radio program on CBS Radio's "American School of the Air" in 1939, and then was given his own network program, "Back Where I Come From." In 1948 he was the host of "On Top of Old Smokey," a radio show on the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Mr. Lomax sang alongside Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson during the 1948 presidential campaign of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace. During the McCarthy period, when Mr. Seeger and other left-wing performers were blacklisted because of their political views, Mr. Lomax left the country. He had received a Guggenheim fellowship to study British folk music and lived in England from 1950 to 1957. He compiled an archive of British folk songs and created programs for English radio and television. The sound of rural American music was a major factor in the British skiffle craze that yielded groups like the Quarry Men, John Lennon's first band.

Mr. Lomax also collected folk music in Spain in 1953-54 and in Italy in 1955, helping to spur folk revivals in those countries. Those collecting trips also resulted in two 10-part BBC radio series, on Spanish and Italian folk music. Columbia Records issued the 18-volume "Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music" in 1955, a pioneering survey of world music. "Folk Songs of the United States," a five-album set, was drawn from Mr. Lomax's field recordings for the Library of Congress.

Fueling a Folk Revival

When Mr. Lomax returned to the United States, the folk revival he had envisioned was flourishing. His collection "The Folk Songs of North America" was published by Doubleday in 1960. Young musicians were learning the songs he had collected and playing them for eager audiences. Mr. Lomax was a consultant who helped choose performers for the annual Newport Folk Festival.

He returned to the South in 1959-60 to make the first stereo field recordings of American music; 19 albums were released on Atlantic and Prestige Records, including the first recordings by the country bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. On a 1962 trip to the Caribbean, Mr. Lomax recorded calypsos, Indo-Caribbean chaupai songs, work songs, children's songs and steel-band music. He left an archive of Caribbean music at the University of the West Indies, which also shared in the royalties on recordings.

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

A Purist to the End

Mr. Lomax was displeased by the advent of folk-rock in the mid-1960's, considering it inauthentic. When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band performed at the Newport Folk Festival, he belittled the music, leading to a legendary fistfight with Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. He also denounced Mr. Dylan's move from protest songs to rock.

To the end, he remained a vigorous defender of the old ways. He may have appreciated gospel music, for example, but he was also quick to point out the loss of the improvised spiritual harmonies it displaced.

Mr. Lomax turned to film and television while continuing his academic work. He made films about dance with Forrestine Paulay, a movement analyst, in the 1970's. He wrote, directed and produced a documentary, "The Land Where the Blues Began," in 1985. And he wrote, directed, narrated and produced "American Patchwork," a series of programs on American traditions shown on public television in the early 1990's. For such efforts, he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts.

A Musical Anthropology

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

Mr. Lomax's memoir of his Southern travels, "The Land Where the Blues Began," was published in 1993 by Pantheon; it won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. Although he had two strokes in 1995, he continued to advise Rounder Records on the Lomax Collection, a 100-CD series of his recordings that the label began to reissue in 1997.

Mr. Lomax is survived by a daughter, Anna L. Chairetakis, and a stepdaughter, Shelley Roitman, both of Holiday, Fla., and a sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, of Northridge, Calif.

"We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him," Mr. Lomax once reflected. "Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency."




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