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Artists Associated
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Alan Lomax |
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Alan Lomax: Musicologist
Alan Lomax |
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Folk song hunter and visionary
Alan Lomax (b. Austin, Texas, 1915) spent more than six decades working to
promote knowledge and appreciation of folk music all over the world. He
began his career alongside his father, the pioneering folklorist John Avery
Lomax, and by 1933, the father-son team had launched a major effort to
develop the Archive of Folksong at the Library of Congress (established
1928). They produced thousands of field recordings of folk musicians
throughout the American South, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast, as well as
in Haiti and the Bahamas. Inspired by such a wealth of traditional music,
the Lomaxes published several popular and influential collections of
American folk songs, beginning with American Ballads and Folk Songs. They were also responsible for the first serious
study of a folk musician in American literature--Negro Folk Songs as Sung by
Leadbelly
--which legendary African-American author/historian James Weldon Johnson
called "one of the most amazing autobiographical accounts ever printed in
America."
After completing a philosophy degree at the University of Texas in 1936,
Alan and wife Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold spent several months in Haiti,
conducting fieldwork and recording local musicians. The next year, Lomax was
appointed Director of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of
Congress, and by 1939, in addition to graduate anthropology work at
Columbia, he was producing the first in a series of national radio programs
for CBS. American Folk Songs and Wellsprings of Music for the CBS School of
the Air and the prime-time series Back Where I Come From introduced vast audiences to traditional music, giving exposure to
such pivotal figures as
Woody Guthrie,
Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson,
Josh
White, the
Golden Gate Quartet,
Burl Ives, and
Pete Seeger. Lomax built on
the interest created by his books, records, and broadcasts with numerous
concert series, including The Midnight Special at Town Hall, which
introduced 1940s New Yorkers to blues, flamenco, calypso, and ballad
singing-all still relatively unknown styles. "The main point of my
activity," Lomax once remarked, "was...to put sound technology at the
disposal of The Folk, to bring channels of communication to all sorts of
artists and areas."
Alan Lomax |
After his work with Leadbelly, Lomax hoped to further explore the genre of
oral biography. His experiences and bawdy conversations with New Orleans
jazz pioneer
Jelly
Roll Morton, which produced the 1938 Library of Congress recordings,
also formed the basis for the book Mister Jelly Roll. A remarkably picaresque document, it has
inspired two Broadway musicals. Lomax's oral historical portrait of "Nora"
in The Rainbow Sign was drawn from
1945 fieldwork with Alabama folk singer Vera Hall. Blues in the Mississippi
Night, Lomax's 1946 recording of music and frank talk by
Memphis Slim,
Big
Bill Broonzy, and
Sonny Boy Williamson, remains a classic recorded document
of African American musical history (it was reissued by Rykodisc in 1990).
"Every time I took one of those big, black, glass-based platters out of its
box," Lomax wrote of the recording process, "I felt that a magical moment
was opening up in time. For me the black discs spinning in the Mississippi
night, spitting the chip centripetally toward the center of the
table...heralded a new age of writing human history..."
Alan Lomax |
Several 1940s field trips (described in his 1993 tour de force The Land
Where the Blues Began) took Lomax even deeper into the musical and cultural
world of the African American South. In Mississippi, he became the first to
document several extraordinary African-derived musical repertories, such as
hill country fife-and-drum, and quills (panpipes) music. There, in 1942,
Lomax interviewed and recorded a 29-year-old singer and guitarist named
McKinley Morganfield, later known to the world as
Muddy Waters. In 1947 Lomax returned to Mississippi with the first portable tape recorder to make
even more extensive recordings.
In the 1950s, Lomax set his sights beyond North America and the Caribbean.
Based in England, he conducted far-flung recorded folk surveys of European
musicians, as well as exposing scores of listeners to folk music on a series
of BBC radio programs. His collaborations with Diego Carpitella in Italy,
Seamus Ennis in Ireland, Peter Kennedy in England, and Hamish Henderson in
Scotland, helped spark major folk-song revivals in those countries. During
this period, Lomax began a voluminous recorded overview of world folk
song-the first of its kind-published in eighteen volumes by Columbia
Records.
Returning to the United States in the late 1950s, Lomax set out on two more
major field trips through the American South, resulting in 19 albums issued
on the Atlantic and Prestige International labels in the early '60s. He also
published the groundbreaking collection Folk Songs of North America, which revealed his theoretical interest in music and
culture, eventually leading to a program of systematic research in human
expressive behavior. Along with colleagues at Columbia in the 1960s, Lomax
developed Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics, systems designed
for a cross-cultural analysis of song, speech, dance and movement styles.
Initial results of these projects were published in the 1968 collection Folk
Song Style and Culture.
Since that time, Lomax has published numerous books, journal articles,
recordings, films, teaching materials, and television programs.
Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music, first published in
1976, is widely used to help students understand and analyze world musical
styles. Three teaching films, Dance and Human History, Step Style, and
Palm
Play, also published in the 1970s, introduced students to Choreometrics and
the anthropological analysis of dance. As musical consultant for the 1977
Voyager space probe project directed by Carl Sagan, Lomax ordered the
inclusion of the blues and jazz of
Blind Willie Johnson and
Louis Armstrong,
Andean panpipes and Navajo chants, polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti (Zairean
pygmy tribe) and Caucasus Georgians, alongside the works of Bach, Mozart,
and Beethoven. Due to his efforts, a truly worldwide chorus of human musical
expression was carried to the stars on Voyager. Lomax's 1986 film, The
Longest Trail, combined historical data and choreometric analysis of
movement and dance styles to vividly demonstrate cultural unities among the
Amerindians of North and South America. American Patchwork, his
prize-winning five-hour television series on American regional cultures,
aired on PBS in 1990. The Land Where the Blues Began, an account of Lomax's encounters with African-African musicians, and
his reflections on the Jim Crow South in the 1940s, won the National Book
Critics Award for non-fiction. The four-CD box set, Sounds of the South, Lomax's astounding 1959 stereo recordings of Southern musical traditions,
was reissued by Atlantic Records in 1993.
Alan Lomax |
After 1991, Lomax and team began compiling his most recent project, The
Global Jukebox, a multimedia interactive database which surveys the
relationship between dance, song, and social structure. Lomax intended the
database as a medium for scientific research into human expressive behavior,
and as a tool for social science, arts and humanities education. With The
Jukebox, he also hoped to further "cultural equity"-a concept (coined by Lomax) by which worldwide local cultures are ensured a forum, within the
print and electronic media, to display their arts and values:
All cultures need their fair share of the airtime. When country folk or
tribal peoples hear or view their own traditions in the big media, projected
with the authority generally reserved for the output of large urban centers,
and when they hear their traditions taught to their own children, something
magical occurs. They see that their expressive style is as good as that of
others, and, if they have equal communicational facilities, they will
continue it...
Practical men often regard these expressive systems as doomed and valueless.
Yet, wherever the principle of cultural equity comes into play, these
creative wellsprings begin to flow again.even in this industrial age, folk
traditions can come vigorously back to life, can raise community morale, and
give birth to new forms if they have time and room to grow in their own
communities. The work in this field must be done with tender and loving
concern for both the folk artists and their heritages. This concern must be
knowledgeable, both about the fit of each genre to its local context and
about its roots in one or more of the great stylistic traditions of
humankind.
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