ALAN LOMAX REMEMBERED
1915 - 2002
"I say then that cultures do not and never have flourished in isolation, but have flowered in sites that guaranteed their independence and at the same time permitted unforced acceptance of external influences." This is a much more realistic formulation than either cultural separatism or cultural assimilation.
- " Saga of a Folksong Hunter -- A Twenty year Odyssey with Cylinder, Disc and Tape ." Alan Lomax 1960
- K-12 Integrating Folklore, Music, & Traditional Culture
- Interdisciplinary Educational Curriculum
- Curriculum Standards, Benchmarks
- About Woody Guthrie
2012 "Folklorist's Global Jukebox Goes Digital," NYT
The folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was a prodigious
collector of traditional music from all over the world and a
tireless missionary for that cause. Long before the Internet
existed, he envisioned a “global jukebox” to disseminate and
analyze the material he had gathered during decades of fieldwork.
From NPR... Alan Lomax Massive Archive Goes Online
The best song-makers for children are the folk, whose rhymes are rubbed clean and hard against the bone of life, whose fantasies are heart-warming and fertile because they rise out of billions of accumulated hours of living with and caring for children. . . . The jingles, riddles, silly ballads, wistful lullabies, jiggy tunes and game songs belonging to the children of the American frontier will one day make a book far more warm and witty than the traditional Mother Goose.
1925. Moe Asch (b. Warsaw, Poland, December 2, 1905; d. New York, N.Y., October 19, 1986), later founder of Folkways Records, stumbles across John A. Lomax's book of cowboy songs in a Paris bookstand. The book and its Presidential endorsement make a profound impression on him, causing him to conclude that “a people have no culture unless they have folksongs.”
Folklorist's Global Jukebox Goes Digital," New York Times 2012
A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to
Lomax's imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some
5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000
videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it
tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being
digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About
17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the
end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as
CDs or digital downloads. On Tuesday, to commemorate what would
have been Lomax's 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label is
releasing “The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife
Center,” a digital download sampler of 16 field recordings from
different locales and stages of Lomax's career.
|
Alan Lomax Archives Alan Lomax in 1946
Remembered 1915-2002
|
|---|
Alan Lomax is survived by his daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis of Holiday, FL; his grandson Odysseus Desmond Chairetakis of Holiday, FL; his sister Bess Lomax Hawes of Northridge, CA; his step-daughter Shelley Roitman of Holiday, FL; his nephews; John Lomax III, Nicolas Hawes, John Bishop, Drew Mihalik, and his nieces; Ellen Harold, Patricia Gordon, Susan Mihalik, Naomi Bishop and Corey Dinos. Tribute Page
In the early 1930s, Alan Lomax and his father, pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax , first developed the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folksong as a major national resource. Alan Lomax has been called "The Father of the American Folksong Revival," for his subsequent work as an ethnomusicologist, record producer and network radio host/writer. He first presented Woody Guthrie , Leadbelly, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger to a national audience on his radio programs in the '30s and '40s. As a radio producer and field recordist at the BBC, he sparked a British folksong revival, which soon fueled the British pop-rock Invasion. He also assembled the first recorded overview of world folksong for Columbia Records. As an anthropologist of the performing arts (for Columbia University and Hunter College), he has produced a multimedia interactive database called The Global Jukebox, which surveys the relationship between dance, song, and human history. The author/producer of many books, scientific articles, films, and record releases, Lomax has also become a passionate advocate of "cultural equity," a principle which proposes to reverse the centralization of communication and give equal media time to the whole range of human cultures. Recent projects include the prize-winning 1990 television series, American Patchwork for PBS; and the documentary portrait of the blues in Mississippi, entitled The Land Where the Blues Began, which won the 1993 National Book Critics Award for non-fiction.
Alan Lomax is best known for his work in America as a folklorist and ethnomusicologist, but in fact, he traveled the world documenting the music of many cultures. Alan Lomax recorded, organized and analyzed over 5,000 hours of field recordings and 2,500 hours of film and video from around the world throughout six decades for what is now regarded as one of the premier collections of 20th Century world folk music
Sister Bess Lomax Hawes - Noted folklorist and performer with Pete Seeger.
Son John and Ruby Lomax on their three-month trip across the American South in 1939. The pair traveled over 6,500 miles and, along the way, recorded approximately 25 hours of folk music from over 300 performers. These gems of American musical culture include fiddle tunes, cowboy songs , field hollers, lullabies, and spirituals. Find a special thematic presentation that contains a detailed itinerary of their travels, complete with hyperlinks to songs recorded along the way.
John Nova Lomax
- Houston Press (June 14, 2007)
"Wasn't your grandfather the guy who discovered Leadbelly?" Having
the same name and being in the same trade as John and Alan Lomax,
I get questions like that a lot. And yes, I am related to both of
them, but neither was my grandfather. John Avery Lomax was my
great-grandfather, and Alan Lomax was my grandfather's brother.
John Avery Lomax Jr. was my grandfather, and though he is not as
widely remembered as his father and brother, his contributions to
American music and that of Houston deserve remembering in their
own right. Since today is the 100th anniversary of his birth, at
the risk of great self-indulgence (hell, isn't that what blogs are
for?), I'd like to post a little something about him.
ANECDOTES
GRAMMY Magazine - February 21, 2003 2003 Trustees Award: Alan
Lomax
This Special Merit Award is presented by vote of the Recording
Academy's National Trustees to individuals who, during their
careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than
performance, to the field of recording. The Trustees Award was
established in 1967.
A Brief Description Of A Very Unique And Folkloric Event
by Peggy Bolger Library of Congress
Alan's funeral was held in Tarpon Springs, Florida, where he has
been living and recovering from a major stroke in the care of Anna
Chairetakas (his daughter) and her son, Odysseus. [For those who
don't know, Tarpon is a Florida city that is known for its Greek
community. Settled originally by Greek sponge fishermen, the
community has retained a remarkable amount of traditional culture
and artistic expression from the Greek archipeligo]. Attended by
about 60 loving family and immediate friends, as well as his
caregivers for the past few years and new-found Florida friends,
the funeral was an intimate time to reflect on Alan's life as a
father, uncle, and grandfather. It was not a huge gathering with
the professionals and musicians that he has worked with over the
years . . . . my understanding is that a New York memorial service
may be held later in the year.
Anna, who has been "adopted" by the wonderful Tsimouis family of
Tarpon Springs (many of you may remember Nikitas Tsimouris, the
traditional Greek bagpipe maker and player who participated in
festivals in Florida and DC, and received heritage awards in his
later life). Nikitas' widow became Anna's godmother when she
became a Greek Orthodox church member. Anna arranged for a brief
Greek Orthodox service, and many in the gathering were from the
church. When the priest was done, John Lomax III began the
informal testimonies by regaling us with funny anecdotes about his
uncle. Odysseus read a few of the email testimonies that had come
to Anna, including ones from Studs Terkle and Stetson Kennedy.
Unfortunately, many people could not attend due to illness (I
guess a sign of our aging numbers).
Steve Belmont, who is a music producer and promoter who had worked
with Elvis, gave an astonishing brief story . . . Later in his
life, Elvis asked Steve one day to listen to a song he had learned
called "Lordy, Lordy, Lordy" and to tell him who wrote it. Steve
listened and said, that must be from a 50s group like the Comets.
Elvis replied "No, that was recorded in the 1930s by two geniuses!
John and Alan Lomax."
Then an elderly woman with a cane rose and said that she never
knew Alan Lomax, but she had been a school teacher in the 1950s
and 1960s. She was teaching in one of the first integrated
elementary schools, where the tensions (even at that age) were
terrible. She had heard Alan's LP Library of Congress recording of
African-American children's songs and realized that several songs
were also sung by her formerly all-white class.
She used Alan's recordings to break down the barriers in her
students, using music to transcend the situation in the
school.
She ended her account by saying that to her, Alan was a hero for
recognizing the power of traditional song and preserving it for
us.
I offered my perspective from the Library of Congress, and spoke
of Alan's prolific collections that are NOT music and referenced
the Pearl Harbor collection as one that has proven to be
invaluable to the historic record.
A close family friend sang an Italian lullaby that Anna and Alan
used to sing together.
Alan was arrayed in the traditional manner, without a coffin,
lying on a velvet bier, family and friends could say their
goodbyes before and during the service. On either side were large
flower tributes that had arrived, including one in the shape of a
boat that Anna said would have been his favorite. Also arrayed on
the sides were photo albums and framed photos of Alan in the field
and doing his life's work, as well as his two guitars. During the
course of the viewing and funeral, somehow Alan acquired several
"goods" to take with him. I never saw anyone actually place these
objects, but when we filed out, Alan had a deck of cards in one
hand (from his physical therapist who played cards and games with
him) and in the other hand was a framed photo (I think of his
wife) and a CD.
One special attendee was Clara, the dog, who was a special friend
to Alan in these last years. We all went to Anna's house
afterwards to visit and eat incredible Greek food that kept
arriving from the community.
So, these are just really off the cuff impressions, but I hope it
gives a sense of the event . . . a journalist I am not.
"'What the Neighbors Say:' The Radio Research Project of the
Library of Congress" by Alan Gevinson. It
appears in an LC publication entitled _Performing Arts
Broadcasting_ (published in 2002) featuring several articles on
radio collections at the LC. Gevinson's article focuses on a
Library initiative (with money from the Rockefeller Foundation)
begun in 1941 to establish a recording lab at the LC and to create
radio programs and "documentaries" drawn from LC collections. This
resulted in numerous field recording trips (guided by Alan Lomax
who was then in charge of the LC's Archive of American Folk Song)
including the Asheville Folk Festival, "Okie" and "Arkie" migrant
camps, opinions of the war in Europe (and then the bombing of
Pearl Harbor), interviews with members of the Strates Carnival,
and many others. These recordings were then turned into radio
programs for broadcast. The article discusses the reasons and
motivations behind creating these radio programs from the Library,
and how the development of these documentaries went from scripts
read by actors (including a young Arthur Miller) to some of the
more unscripted voices from the public.
We also have a guide to our Alan Lomax CBS American School of the
Air collection (from 1939-1942).
CRITICISM of LOMAX
1)
Leadbelly source
" [... anything can be copyrighted, at least for a time. Unlike
the United States Patent Office, there is no one in the Copyright
Office to verify the originality of the work to be copyrighted.
However, I know of at least one federal case in which the court
ruled that if the antiquity of a song can be proven, the copyright
fails.
John and Alan Lomax, who also devoted themselves to collecting and
preserving traditional folk music, took the controversial step of
copyrighting in their own names the songs they collected, as if
they had written the songs themselves
.
They even copyrighted original songs collected from other
singers, such as Leadbelly's "Good Night Irene."
This prompted Leadbelly to add a verse to "De Ballad of De Boll
Weevil":
"If anybody axes you who it was dat wrote dis song,
Tell 'em it was a black-skinned nigger wid a pair oí blue duckins on.
If anybody axes you who it was dat copyrighted dis song,
Tell 'em Alan Lomax and his goddamned father John."]
2) Years later, in an expanded edition of " Cowboy Songs ," Professor Lomax characterized the enigmatic lyrics and haunting air of Whoopie Ti Yi Yo as being "touched by the style of the Irish traveling folk." Lomax does not credit the SOURCE
3) Ruby Pickens Tartt also helped John Lomax in Alabama's Black Belt.
4) John W. Work III
|
John W. Work III (ca. 1950.) was a composer and musicologist at Fisk University in Nashville. Fisk University, Franklin Library, Special Collections
Grammy recipient, Album Notes:
|
|---|
According to " Lost Delta Found ," Work, the leader of the Fisk research team , who initiated the Mississippi study when he applied to the Library of Congress for money to support a recording trip to Natchez. Alerted to Work's interest in Southern vernacular music, Lomax, who ran the library's Archive of American Song, entered the picture and, Mr. Gordon and Mr. Nemerov say, diverted the project to Coahoma. Once the team arrived in Coahoma, they were told of a blues singer who worked as a farmhand on Col. Howard Stovall's plantation. That farmhand turned out to be McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters.
Mr. Gordon sifted through Lomax's vast archive at Hunter College in New York, where, after much burrowing, he found a manuscript stuffed in the back of a file cabinet in a powder-blue cover with Lewis Wade Jones's name on it. Also written on the cover were the words " Property of Fisk University ."
When Mr. Gordon matched up the document to the incomplete,
hand-written manuscript that Mr. Nemerov had unearthed, he knew he
had discovered a significant contribution to Southern folkloric
scholarship. Work's manuscript, in particular, is a crucial primer
on the region's musical practices, from sermons to children's
songs - his careful academic analysis leavened with interviews
with the county's citizens. "To me, Work is important because he's
an academic who sees the value of homegrown, vernacular material,"
Mr. Gordon said. "Most academics were ashamed of that." Unlike
Lomax, Work took note of well-spoken blacks who owned land, and
the fact that spirituals were already on the wane in certain parts
of Mississippi - both of which ran counter to Lomax's assumptions
about the Southern black man, Mr. Gordon said.
"That's the biggest difference between Work's assessment of the
South and Lomax's evaluations in his own book," Mr. Gordon said.
"One documented what was there, the other focused on what he'd
expected to find. Lomax was disappointed to discover that blacks
owned land, because it didn't conform to his vision of the South."
According to the book, Lomax used a photograph of a
sharecropper's cabin in his book without giving proper credit to
Work.
More on NPR segement on Nemerov & Gordon's study of John Work's work in Lost Delta Found
Adding Notes to a Folklorist's Tunes 2007 Recording Black
Culture
TWO years ago, the book “Lost Delta Found” criticized the American
folklorist
Alan Lomax
for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers
with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the
1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation
of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly
enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider
audience. With the release of “Recording Black Culture,” an album
consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the
collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to
buttress this claim.
Arlo Guthrie's response to Dave Marsh criticizing Alan Lomax
PERSONAL REMEMBERENCES
Remembering Alan Lomax
January 13, 1915—July 19, 2002
7/26/02 writes about Lomax's influence, working with him, and
listening to him talk.
"I listened this afternoon to the "All Things Considered" report
on
Alan Lomax
's death, and I find myself thinking instead on his life and
contributions.
Alan had many great gifts, and he gave all of us many great
gifts as well. I feel blessed by his vision of the role of the
documentary media in contemporary culture. He was one of a
handful of visionaries who saw that the documentary media were
tools not just for observing culture but for recasting and
renewing the cultural process itself. And I feel equally blessed
by his vision of culture -- a vision that included both cultural
interchange and cultural tenacity, that saw culture as both a
distinguishing feature and an interconnecting fabric. His love
of global science coexisted with his love of the spirit of the
globally threatened, and he saw science and technology as forces
to harness on behalf of the cultural traditions that crystallize
human creativity.
Alan is one of a handful who helped shape the last century and
this one. It is a privilege to have known and worked with him."
"He was a great man.
Without him the world of music and jazz would be much
impoverished. His library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll
Morton alone establish his importance and his writings and
discoveries make up a large part of the treasury and tradition we
can now cherish."
NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
Lomax
remembered in the (London) Independent
Alan Lomax
Preserver of vanishing musical tradition by Paul Wadey 22 July
2002
Alan Lomax
, musicologist: born Austin, Texas 31 January 1915; twice married
(one daughter); died Safety Harbor, Florida 19 July 2002.
Alan Lomax
played a crucial role in the preservation of the world's musical
heritage. He dedicated some 60 years of his life giving "a voice
to the voiceless" and putting "neglected cultures and silenced
people into the communications chain". Bob Dylan lauded him quite
simply as a "missionary".
His field recordings with the likes of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and
Jelly Roll Morton sparked the folk revival of the 1940s and
eventually gave shape to rock'n'roll. His advocacy of the music he
"discovered", and its dissemination through friends like
Woody Guthrie
and Pete Seeger and, later, through radio and television, has
given it a central position in popular culture. His later work on
the folk music of both Europe and the
Caribbean
helped to underline the close musical relationships that exist
between these forms.
Lomax
was born in Austin, Texas in 1915.
His father,
John A. Lomax
, was an eminent musicologist whose books
Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads (1910) and Songs of the
Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (1918)
did much to preserve a vanishing musical tradition. It seemed
natural for Alan to follow in his father's footsteps and so, at
the age of 17, he joined his father on an epic 16,000-mile quest
across the American South.
With cumbersome recording equipment and a supply of fragile
acetates loaded into the back of their car they began perhaps the
most important field survey of roots music ever undertaken. They
coaxed from strangers songs that had their origins not only in
19th- and 18th-century Europe, but also, in the case of the blues,
in West Africa. Musicians were encouraged to talk about the music
and to reflect on what it meant to them, thereby creating an
important oral history.
The older Lomax's remit was to collect material for the
Archive of American Folk Song
,
established by the Library of Congress in 1928
. He and Alan found it wherever rural people gathered together: in
Appalachian mountain communities and in the small sharecropping
towns of the Mississippi Delta. State penitentiaries, too, proved
a potent source of material, said
Alan Lomax
:
"The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in
their performances. There was more emotional heat, more power,
more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs
could produce."
If many of the prisoners they recorded are, like James "Iron Head"
Baker and Mose "Clear Rock" Platt, all but forgotten, the Lomaxes
also "discovered" a convicted murderer named Huddie Ledbetter in
Angola Penitentiary, Louisiana who would go on to achieve
legendary status as the folk-blues musician Leadbelly. They played
an important role in securing his parole in 1934 and in 1939 Alan
produced the recording sessions that resulted in the disc Negro
Sinful Songs, following them a year later with the singer's fine
collaboration with the Golden Gate Quartet, The Midnight Special.
In 1935 Alan Lomax
travelled with friends to record musicians on the Georgia Sea
Islands. Both he and the folklorist
Mary Barnicle
blackened their faces with walnut juice to avoid unwelcome
attention from the local whites.
In 1937
he made his first solo foray into the field, heading for eastern
Kentucky. Despite a degree of local hostility that on one occasion
saw him attacked by a man with a knife, he recorded over 200 sides
there. A telegram from Harlan, Kentucky to Washington in September
of that year was characteristic: "I have made so far 32 records,
some of them quite marvellous, some of them mediocre, but all
necessary."
In 1938
he interviewed extensively the great jazz composer
Jelly Roll Morton
. These recordings were later issued and Morton's reminiscences
formed the basis for a book, Mr Jelly Roll (1950) and later an
off-Broadway show, Jelly Roll!. Three years later Lomax recorded
three sides by McKinley Morganfield, later to achieve fame as the
blues great Muddy Waters.
Lomax's left-wing politics would have made life in America
uncomfortable for him during the McCarthy era and he settled for
several years in Britain, where a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled
him to research English folk song. Over the next few years he also
visited Spain and Italy and in 1955 his researches resulted in
Columbia Records' landmark 18-volume set World Library of Folk and
Primitive Music. A series of broadcasts made by Lomax for the BBC
had an undisputed influence on popular music here, particularly on
the evolution of skiffle.
By the late Fifties
Alan Lomax
was back in America and again undertaking fieldwork in the Deep
South. He oversaw the first recordings by Mississippi Fred
McDowell and in
1959
recorded a group of prisoners, led by James Carter, at the
Parchman Penitentiary.
Some 40 years later that song, "Po' Lazarus" featured
prominently on the award-winning soundtrack of the film O
Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
. He acted as a consultant for the Newport Folk Festivals, all the
while showing obvious disapproval of the move by some musicians,
Dylan among them, towards electrification.
In the decades leading up to his retirement in 1996, Lomax
concentrated increasingly on academic work, much of it while based
at Columbia University in New York. He investigated the recurring
stylistic and social patterns that he believed could be found in
music and dance around the world. In addition, he wrote books
his volume
The Land Where the Blues Began
was named non-fiction title of 1993 by the National Book Critics'
Circle and developed a multi-media project, "Global Jukebox", that
enables users to make connections between the world's many styles
of dance and music.
Another remembrance of Alan Lomax , with some interesting interpretations of his influence, from ABC News
OBIT from the New York Times - need to subscribe
LOUISIANA'S DEBT TO THE LOMAXES
Father and son,
John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax
made historic contributions to American music. The son died last
week at 87, but he and his father left a legacy of recordings that
preserved folk, blues and jazz music that might well have
disappeared.
No state in the Union should be more grateful to the Lomaxes than
Louisiana. From folkies like Leadbelly from Mooringsport, to Cajun
musicians recorded on bulky reel-to-reel machines in homes and on
back porches throughout south Louisiana, the music preserved by
the Lomaxes is an incredibly important part of Louisiana's
cultural heritage.
John Lomax's 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."
<snip>
A journey in search of the final resting place of the legendary Louisiana bluesman Lead Belly's final resting place. Set to the song "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" by Lead Belly.
Praise Song for Alan Lomax by Nick Spitzer
The various articles about the life and work of folklorist Alan
Lomax (including "
A Man of his Time; Voices for All Time
" Jon Pareles July 28, 2002) were well deserved and largely
appreciated by those who carry on collaborative research and
public presentation with traditional artists and communities.
However, the description of Lomax's supposed aversion to
documenting singular virtuosic performers, and his purported focus
on isolated pre- or anti-modern cultures, makes the visionary
documentarian seem both hopelessly antiquarian and unable to
accept individual artistic brilliance. Lomax realized that
isolation often played a passive role in preserving the cultural
traditions he revered, but he was hardly an isolationist in his
love of advancing artists in his radio programs, recordings and
films. Indeed, he wanted traditional performers to be able to
compete within the economic and political realities of modern
society. In his famous 1970 "Appeal for Cultural Equity," Lomax
argued against isolation as a force of community cultural health
for perpetuating traditions, and praised such musical crossroads
as Nashville of the 1930s and 40s and New Orleans both past and
present. From the latter Caribbean-inflected polyglot port city,
came one of the greatest documents Lomax created: the Library of
Congress oral history of jazz piano genius and composer Jelly Roll
Morton.
Mr. Pareles oddly suggests that
Alan Lomax
often focused on less skillful musicians as better "generic"
representatives of the varied cultures he sought to document. Yet
this ignores the vast number of unknown, but excellent by any
standard, performers he recorded like Blue Ridge mountain
guitarist and singer E.C. Ball, or Mississippi prison chain-gang
song leader Ervin Webb. Many of the communal art forms Lomax
recorded in-situ--such as Bahamian children's ring play, Louisiana
Creole jur chants, or Tuscan lullabies--were simply not meant to
be judged as the expressions of "brilliant maverick" performers.
Still, the pioneering folklorist's work with Lead Belly, Woody
Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Jelly Roll alone meets the "great
artist" standard of cultural history that was subtly invoked by
the writer. In the end, Lomax himself was a brilliant maverick to
document, preserve and project all these voices--now famous, or
still anonymous--as part of "the big river of oral tradition,"
from which thankfully we can still drink.
About Nick Spitzer -
LISTEN TO NPR
:
- Dr. Nick Spitzer - Host and Producer, American Roots (public
radio series)
Professor, Folklore and Cultural Conservation, Professor of
folklore at the University of New Orleans, produces and hosts the
syndicated public radio music program:
American Routes
Public Radio International
1118 Royal St
New Orleans LA 70116
504-539-9639/
- Pete Seeger - Folksinger
- Worth Long - Co-producer of the documentary film The Land Where
the Blues Began
CD Tracks from Lomax Collection on Rounder:
Leadbelly: Rounder CD 1099 Go Down Hannah :Tracks #5 Leadbelly on the Blues (interview) & #11 John Hardy learned from Woody Guthrie
Rounder CD 1044: Midnight Special :Track #1 & 2: Goodnight Irenerecorded in Angola by John and Alan Lomax.
Woody Guthrie: Rounder CD 1041/2/3: Library of Congress RecordingsTrack #1 (CD1): Conversation & intro to recording./Track #5 (CD1): Short music, some conversation
Jelly Roll Morton: Solo Art SACD 11 Track # 2 Boyhood Memories†& Track #6 Tiger Rag/Panama (begins:Jazz started in New Orleans…)
Field Recordings:
French Louisiana: Rounder CD 1843 Cajun and Creole Music†Track
#14: J'ai fait tout le tour du pays
Caribbean: Rounder CD 1716 : Brown Girl in the Ringâ€: Track #2: Brown Girl in the Ring #20: Miss Lucy Has Some Fine Young Ladies
Blues/ African American
Muddy Waters: from Deep River of Song Rounder 1825 Track 7: “I
Be Bound To Write You Recorded in 1942
Son House: from “Deep River of Song Rounder 1825: Track 14: Low Down Dirty Dog Blues
Fred McDowell: Rounder CD 1718 Track #2 Highway 61 Blues Recorded in September, 1959
Sonny Terry: from Deep River of Song Rounder Track #27 Worried Blues recorded at the Library of Congress 1942 singing/harmonica
Georgia Sea Islands/Bessie Jones: from Voices from the American South Rounder 1701 Track# 1:†O Dayâ€
Old Time/Ballads:
Texas Gladden: from Texas Gladden: Ballad Legacy Rounder 1800
Track# 14:Barbara Allen & Track# 23: Ellen Smith (with her
brother Hobart Smith)
Hobart Smith: from Voices from the American South, Rounder 1800 Track #2 Katy went a Fishin.. or Track 2 Drunken Hiccupsâ on Hobart Smith Rounder CD 1799
World Music Field Recordings
Italy: From Collection Sampler Rounder 1700: Track 23 Stornell Recorded in Tuscany, 1954 (singer tells everyone to be silent before he starts singing-good crowd noise)
Ireland: From World Library of Folk & Primitive Music Rounder 1742: Track 32: Mrs. McGrath (song)Seamus Ennis (who collected alongside Alan in Ireland in 1951) or Track 34: The Bucks of Oranmore (Seamus shows his uilleann pipe playing)
England: From World Library of Folk & Primitive Music Rounder 1741: Track 5: Jim and Bob Copper “The Contented Country Lad recorded in Sussex in 1951.
Alan Lomax Singing: From There is No Eye-John Cohen Collection SFW 40091 Track #20 Love My Darling
Oh Brother Soundtrack
: Track #1 Po Lazarus James Carter & the Prisioners (field
recording) (with original Lomax from Southern Journey: Bad Man
Ballads: Songs of Outlaws and Desperados track #17) Track #10
Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss
& Gillian Welch (actual field recording of this on Southern
Journey, vol. 3: Hwy 61Rounder CD)
Fast Facts:
Henrietta Yurchenco, who is a contemporary of Alan's and like him was among the earliest folklorist-broadcasters of folk music on radio.
Thanks to men like Alan Lomax and Dick Waterman, Son House left a recorded legacy that spans over five decades. Blues Hall of Fame
Funeral Services for Alan Lomax were on Tuesday July 23, 2002
Vinson Funeral Home
456 East Tarpon Avenue
Tarpon Springs, FL 34689
Viewing was from 3-5PM, Funeral Service 5-6PM
In lieu of flowers the family has asked that donations be made to:
The Blues Music Foundation for the Willie Moore Fund
c/o Experience Music Project
2901 3rd Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
For more information, contact:
Jeff Walker
, or
Ryan McMaken
From Matthew Barton at the LOC.GOV
When he published "
The Land Where the Blues Began
" in 1993, did Alan Lomax deny proper credit to
John Work III and Samuel C. Adams
, two of his African- American collaborators from Fisk University
in the 1940s, as Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov assert in the
book "
Lost Delta Found
"? In his assessment, Marc Weingarten [Book Says Alan Lomax
Neglected Black Scholars, New York
Times August 29, 2005] omits that Lomax's book is not a history of
the 1941- 1942 Coahoma County project, but rather a commentary on
the blues, their meaning and history and his experience of the
culture that created them from 1933 to 1978. Less than half of the
book deals with Coahoma.
Work is mentioned three times in "The Land Where the Blues Began,"
Adams once. Lomax's book however is a highly personal and
idiosyncratic one which draws primarily on his own fieldwork. How
many times should Work and Adams have been mentioned? Lewis Wade
Jones, the third collaborator from Fisk, is prominent in the
Coahoma chapters. This reflects Lomax's stated admiration of
Jones, with whom he collaborated again in 1963, as well as the
fact that Jones spent far more time in the field with Lomax than
Work or Adams.
Surviving correspondence here at the Library of Congress, some of
it available online, shows Lomax writing in support of John Work.
When he included their recordings of Muddy Waters in a 1942
compilation that he edited, Lomax shared credit for them with
Work. In 1943, when B.A. Botkin, Lomax's successor at the Library
of Congress, included the Nashville
Washboard Band's performance of “Soldier's Joy ” on another
anthology, Lomax and Work shared credit, and Work helped the
Library obtain the permission of the performers. In 1962, When the
Library of Congress released “Negro Blues and Hollers,” an album
drawn from the 1941-42 fieldwork, editor Marshall Stearns credited
Lomax, Jones and Work for all of the recordings, noting that it
was part of a joint Library of Congress - Fisk University project.
Lomax never concealed the identities of his fieldwork
collaborators. Their names appeared with his in the Library of
Congress' print publications and record releases. They include
Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Elisabeth Barnicle, Helen Hartness
Flanders, Ivan Walton, George Pullen Jackson, and his wife
Elizabeth Harold Lomax.
Echoing Gordon and Nemerov, Weingarten says that “Lomax wrote
extensively of the Coahoma Country trips in The Land Where the
Blues Began, published long after the fact, but the research was
supposed to have been jointly published some five decades
earlier.” Letters from 1943 between John Work, Thomas Jones
(president of Fisk University), B.A. Botkin (Lomax's successor at
the Archive of American Folksong)and Harold Spivacke (head of the
Library of Congress' Music Division) discuss the manuscript
submitted by Work and in what form it could be published. Lewis
Jones and Alan Lomax were unavailable because of World War II. At
times, there is considerable confusion as to manuscript's
whereabouts, and there may have been more than one version. In a
June, 1943 letter to B.A. Botkin, John Work requests that he be
sent copies of work he left with Botkin and Spivacke, as his
originals were missing. In later years, it seems to have been
agreed that Work, Lomax and others were free to pursue their own
leads with the material. In a 1949 letter to Rae Korson at the
Library of Congress, Lomax reports visiting Fisk and says that he
has the “blessing of the Fisk faculty” to use material from the
study in his new book.. His purpose in writing to Korson was to
find survey material that could not be found at Fisk. In 1958,
John Work wrote to Harold Spivacke to make certain that the
Library would have no objection to the publication of his Coahoma
work, and Spivacke encouraged him to proceed.
The manuscript located by Robert Gordon at the Lomax office was a
mimeographed copy, not an original. Apart from that original,
there may have been other copies. In his 1958 letter to Harold
Spivacke, John Work gives no indication that he does not have a
copy of the manuscript. Gordon and Nemerov note in their
introduction to Lost Delta Found that John Work's papers were
placed in a commercial storage facility in the 1980s, where they
were later lost. It seems plausible that the manuscript - perhaps
even a 1958 revision of it - was among them.
Matthew Barton
American Folklife Center
Library of Congress
Washington, DC
NB: I worked for Alan Lomax in the 1980s and 1990s, and on the
Alan Lomax Collection CD series from 1996 to 2002
The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and
do not necessarily reflect the official opinions of the Library of
Congress.
-------------
Jeff Titon : " Work's manuscript itself, which IMHO is truly
significant and has finally seen the light of day. (How many
pieces of scholarship 60 years old do presses publish? Vanderbilt
University Press is to be commended for doing so.)
Work was the first to transcribe, analyze, and describe the music
of Son House, Muddy Waters, etc. and he did this in the early
1940s. If this material had been available to me when I was
writing EARLY
DOWNHOME BLUES in the late 1960s it would have been immensely
helpful. His descriptions and observations of Black music in the
Delta shortly before WW2 are invaluable also in that they come
from the perspective of a Black musicologist who had studied with
the comparative musicologist George Herzog at Yale (and Herzog had
studied with Hornbostel) -- thus he was interested in a variety of
music, not just the oldest forms, and not just the "best," in
order to get an overall portrait of a people's community music."
Robert Cogswell ~ [... "I agree with Jeff that it's the accomplishments of John Work III that are really at issue with this book. He was an African American scholar decades before the Civil Rights movement, struggling to attain support for his folkore work in a small institution that really didn't get what he was up to, dealing in the context of his day with various powers that be, all of whom had other agendas. The historical fact, now documented, is that his work became obscured and his manuscript didn't get published."]
-//--
Alan and John Lomax hold the copyright for a lot of African
American vernacular music. Go to
http://www.bmi.com/search/
and search by
"Songwriter/Composer" after entering LOMAX ALAN, 884 titles come
back, 693 under John Lomax.
The Sonic Journey of Alan Lomax: Recording America and the
World
American Routes follows the journeys made by folklorist Alan Lomax
as he documented the diversity of the traditional music of
America, in the face of what he felt was the increased threat by
popular "monoculture." We'll look into Lomax's work as a sound
recordist, cultural theorist, radio host and shaper of 20th
century pop culture through his discoveries. Weekly updates on
American Routes programs send us your e-mail address to
mail@amroutes.org