Alan Lomax R.i.P
Stephen Jay Morris
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From: Brad Frost
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Subject: Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
By JON PARELES
"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."
Alan 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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David Rintoul
Lomax's many achievements. Here are a couple of obituaries filed with the
Associated Press. Godspeed, Mr. Lomax, you have earned your rest.
-------------
Jul. 21, 12:10 EDT
Alan Lomax, American songcatcher
Ted Anthony
ASSOCIATED PRESS
He was an adventurer with boundless energy, scouring mountains and
back roads for authentic American voices, taping them, and carrying them
home to the city, to performers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Bob
Dylan. You may never have heard of Alan Lomax, but because of his life work,
anyone can visit the U.S. Library of Congress today and hear the voices of
miners and railroad men and grandmothers and itinerant balladeers who sang
long ago into machines long gone.
Lomax died of cardiac arrest Friday, at 87, at Mease Countryside
Hospital in Safety Harbor, Fla. He had moved to the Tampa area from New York
in 1996, after 60 years of folk-song hunting, producing a body of work that
jumpstarted the roots revival and influenced the development of rock 'n'
roll, inspiring musicians from Mick Jagger to Moby.
Two songs from the Lomax collection were featured on the 2002
Grammy-winning soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Lomax believed 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. Delta blues, Appalachian ballads, New Orleans
jazz, English bawdy songs - wherever they were sung, he and his bulky
equipment were there, long before interstate highways and air travel made
remote places accessible. Among the famous musicians recorded were Woody
Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter (known as Leadbelly), "Jelly Roll" Morton, Muddy
Waters and Son House.
Lomax hit the road with his father - John Avery Lomax, a patriarch of
folk-music collecting - in 1933, at 18. They traversed the South, stopping
at prison farms, sawmills, general stores. 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.
In 1937, Lomax set out on his own for a mountainous expanse of eastern
Kentucky. The excursion produced 228 new songs, like "Rising Sun Blues,"
later popularized as "House of the Rising Sun."
"I have made so far 32 records, some of them quite marvellous, some of
them mediocre, but all necessary," he wired Washington from Kentucky in
September, 1937.
The 1940s were 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.
Jul. 20, 09:08 EDT
Alan Lomax saved music of blues, jazz greats
Pioneer musicologist who recorded Guthrie, Leadbelly and others
dead at 87
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 in Florida. He was 87.
Lomax died at Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Fla.,
said Lisa Kissinger of Vinson Funeral Home. Kissinger said she didn't know
the cause of death. Lomax moved in 1996 from New York 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 2002 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 kilograms.
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 Woody
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, 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 'n' 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."
His book, The Land Where the Blues Began, won the 1993 National
Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction. 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."
Lomax is survived by a daughter and a sister.
-
David Rintoul
david....@sympatico.ca
http://www3.sympatico.ca/david.rintoul
"In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends."
J. Churton Collins
Gloria Lenon
when we introduced ourselves he was so surprised that I knew about him - I
was so glad to shake the hand of the man and have some great conversation
that I didn't want to get off the plane!
Rest in peace, Alan.
--
gloria - only the iguanas know for sure