Rambles: Alan Lomax

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Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music by Benjamin Filene

Alan Lomax, folk music's foremost pioneer and ethnomusicologist, died July 19, 2002.

Lomax was born in Texas in 1915. In the early 1930s, he 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. As a radio producer and field recordist at the BBC, he sparked a British folksong revival, which soon fueled the British pop-rock invasion.

The author/producer of many books, scientific articles, films and record releases, Lomax was a passionate advocate of "cultural equity," a principle that proposes to reverse the centralization of communication and give equal media time to the whole range of human cultures.

After six decades of "folk song hunting" he retired to Florida in 1996.

The Legacy of Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax is a beloved name in folk revivalism, capturing a dying style of music before it vanished and, as a result, helping to bring it back bigger than ever before. ... Fortunately for us, Lomax made these recordings before it was too late.
- from Tom Knapp's review of Songs of Seduction

Afro-American Folk Music from Tate & Panola Counties, Mississippi (2000)

Alan Lomax in Haiti (2009)

Ballads, Blues & Bluegrass (2012)