LOMAX ALAN

Born in Austin, Texas, musicologist, writer and producer, Alan Lomax spent over six decades working to promote knowledge and appreciation of the world’s folk music. Alongside his father, the pioneering folklorist, John A, Lomax, he began his career in 1933 expanding the holdings of recorded folk music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. On several of their many field trips, they visited Texas and Louisiana prisons where they recorded Lead Belly among others.
In the late 30s Alan Lomax was appointed Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folk Song and while there interviewed both Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie for their Library of Congress recordings. While doing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University, he produced the first of several radio series and exposed national audiences to regional American music and such talents as Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Josh White as well as Guthrie and Lead Belly, He further explored the genre of oral biography by recording Jelly Roll Morton and later in 1947 recorded Blues in the Mississippi Night, an album of music and candid discussion with Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson including “Another Man Done Gone” and Prison Songs/Murderous Home, historical recordings from Parchman Farm 1947-1948 including “Rosie”.

In the 50s Alan Lomax laid the foundations for folk song revivals in Italy, Ireland, England and Scotland and compiled and edited an 18 volume LP series anthologizing world folk music. Returning to the United States in 1958, two long field trips through the American South resulted in the Southern Journey recordings, 19 albums issued in the early 1960s. He recorded extensively in the Caribbean during this period and published the groundbreaking anthology Folk Songs of North America which signaled his growing interest in the relationship of folk song style and culture, This preoccupation led to a massive program of research into expressive behavior from 1961-1995 housed first at Columbia University and then Hunter College with musicologist, anthropologist and dance colleagues which resulted in Cantometrics, Choreometrics and Parlametrics, methodologies for the comparative analysis of song, dance and speech.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Lomax published journal articles and teaching materials and films based on his work in expressive style. While in his sixties Lomax embarked on a final series of field trips to the American South and Southwest which resulted in American Patchwork, a prize winning television series aired on PBS in 1990 which explored several fertile regional and ethnic American musical cultures. That same year Blues in the Mississippi Night was reissued followed in 1993 by a 4 CD set of his 1959 Southern recordings Sounds of the South. The Alan Lomax Collection (1997-2007), a CD series anthologizing Lomax’s career, numbers over a hundred volumes.
In 1989 Lomax and a team of developers began compiling his most ambitious project, the Global Jukebox, a multimedia interactive database that looks at relationships between dance, song and social organization. He intended the Jukebox to serve both as a medium for scientific research into human expressive behavior and as a tool for social science, arts and humanities education. With it, he hoped to further the concept of cultural equity.
Alan Lomax received the National Medal of Arts in 1984, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Nonfiction for The Land Where the Blues Began (1993), the Folk Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award (1995), a Tulane University honorary doctorate (2001) and a posthumous Grammy Trustees’ Award in 2003. In 2000 he was made a Library of Congress Living Legend.