Alan Lomax, Friend of Maxwell Street, dies
Steve B.
July 20, 2002
The Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition is deeply saddened
to have lost musicologist Alan Lomax this week. He was 87 years old.
His life's work and philosophy inspired our Coalition and we were
deeply appreciative for the powerful letter he wrote, while ill, on
our behalf. See <http://www.openair.org/maxwell/plomax.html>.
Maxwell Street was a historic place of working class culture, Blues
creativity, and folk traditions. It is ironic that our fight to save
it was against a major public institution of higher learning, whose
faculty and students were not at all receptive to arguments such as
those from Alan Lomax. We hope the future will listen more to Alan
Lomax and therefore be wiser, showing concern and respect for its
indigenous and authentic folk cultures and a willingness to bestow
value on it, maybe even a greater value than for parking lots, ball
fields, and condos. -- Steve Balkin, Vice President of the Maxwell
Street Historic Preservation Coalition.
The New York Times has a very good obituary article about him by Jon
Pereles on the front page in its July 20, 2002 issue
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/obituaries/20LOMA.html>. Below are
some excerpts:
· 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 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.
· "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."
· "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."
· 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.
· "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."
For more info about Alan Lomax visit the Alan Lomax homepage
<http://www.alan-lomax.com/home.html> which includes information about
him, his archives, and the Association for Cultural Equity, which was
founded to support, preserve, study, and disseminate folk performance
traditions from around the world. The contact info for the latter is
The Association for Cultural Equity, 450 W. 41st St, Rm 606, New York,
NY 10036, PH: 212 268-4623, Email: in...@alan-lomax.com.
-00-
smr
says...
> Alan Lomax, Friend of Maxwell Street, dies
Did he get paid for that title?
> Maxwell Street was a historic place of working class culture, Blues
> creativity, and folk traditions.
It was also a historic place of way-below-code buildings, sanitation
problems, and essentially an open-air stolen goods market.
> · 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."
That would be nice were it not for the fact that I can and will make
value judgments on cultures and say that some are worth far less than
others. A culture of 30000 or so odd folks that practices ritual
clitorectomy and human sacrifice to "gods" is worth much less than say
one of a few hundred million that does neither, nu?
> · "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."
Ahhh... so the cultural equity only applies to _his_ culture. The
culture that produce Beethoven and Bach... well, we can shit all over
that. It sucks. No equity for them!
Get bent.
smr