Compare Gell-Mann: Just as it is crazy to squander in a few decades much of the rich biological diversity that has evolved over billions of years, so is it equally crazy to permit the disappearance of much of human cultural diversity, which has evolved in a somewhat analogous way over many tens of thousands of years The erosion of local cultural patterns around the world is not, however, entirely or even principally the result of contact with the universalizing effect of scientific enlightenment. On Friday recordings, photographs, video and documents are to be donated to the public library in Como, Miss., where in September 1959 Lomax made the first recordings of the blues guitarist Fred . Lomax transferred to the University of Texas the following year.[56]. Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was a major figure in folklore and ethnomusicology, known for his theoretical work, cultural advocacy, and seminal public programs. Sure enough, in October, FBI agents were interviewing Lomax's friends and acquaintances. In the place of the old master was the . The Alan Lomax collection of Michigan and Wisconsin recordings (AFC 1939/007) documents Irish, Italian, Finnish, Serbian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Croatian, French Canadian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Swedish songs and stories, as well as occupational folklife among loggers and lake sailors in Mich He was, he claimed, 15 at the time he was actually 17 and a college student and he said he had intended to participate in a peaceful demonstration. That summer, Congress was debating the McCarran Act, which would require the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies",[31] while the House Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President", was recorded in January and February 1942. "[21], In 1940, Lomax and his close friend Nicholas Ray went on to write and produce a fifteen-minute program, Back Where I Came From, which aired three nights a week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically. On August 24, 1997, at a concert at Wolf Trap, Vienna, Virginia, Bob Dylan had this to say about Lomax, who had helped introduce him to folk music and whom he had known as a young man in Greenwich Village: There is a distinguished gentlemen here who came I want to introduce him named Alan Lomax. As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet. Describes the history of the Lomax family and the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Especially powerful when walking home drunk, on max volume. I think I arrived in April and I don't think we went south until August. Wished I Was In Heaven Sitting Down 9. 11 - Honor the Lamb Lomax, who was a founding member of People's Songs, was in charge of campaign music for Henry A. Wallace's 1948 Presidential run on the Progressive Party ticket on a platform opposing the arms race and supporting civil rights for Jews and African Americans. Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his second year there. [29], In December 1949 a newspaper printed a story, "Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers'", that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. In the United States, he was responsible for priceless recordings of Leadbelly (who Lomax first recorded in prison), Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton and many others. On the first day of fall, 1959, in Como, Mississippi, a farmer named Fred McDowell emerged . Among the artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, Scottish Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil, and country blues singers Lead Belly and Muddy Waters, among many others. He played a key role in the development of the Center's work. The possibilities for this new, modern frontier seem endlesssomething that Lomax himself surely would've appreciated. Collins described her arrival in America 1959 in an interview with Johan Kugelberg: Bulgarian singer Valya Balkanska, "Shepherdess Song", [America Sings the Saga of America" (1947)], Ironically, perhaps, the phrase originated in an, On the vital connection between biological diversity and cultural diversity, see Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin, "Scientists Offer New Insight into What to Protect of the World's Rapidly Vanishing Languages, Cultures, and Species" in, Alan Lomax - Southern prison music and Lead Belly, Last edited on 11 February 2023, at 00:53, The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), American Association for the Advancement of Science, Notable alumni of St. Mark's School of Texas, "Alan Lomax Collection (The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)", "The American Folklife Center Celebrates Lomax Centennial", "National Sampler: Florida Audio and Video Samples and Notes", "Joan Halifax, Mindfulness, and the Most Important Thing", "John A Lomax and Alan Lomax Papers: About this Collection", "After the Day of Infamy: 'Man-on-the-Street' Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor", Harry S. Truman, "Veto of the Internal Security Bill", "David Attenborough talks about his early years making a music series", "Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87", "National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellowships 2008", "About The Association for Cultural Equity | Association for Cultural Equity", "4 September 2007 releases: Communists and suspected Communists", "About the Library | Library of Congress", "Jelly Roll Wins at Grammys (March 2006) Library of Congress Information Bulletin", "Folklorist's Global Jukebox Goes Digital", "Alan Lomax's Massive Archive Goes Online: The Record". For research requests contact Todd Harvey, Curator, Alan Lomax Collection, [emailprotected], 202-707-8245. Lomax was born in Austin, Texas, in 1915,[4][5][6] the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax. He was a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. The FBI investigation was concluded the following year, shortly after Lomax's 65th birthday. Created by Alan Lomax, John A. Lomax, Sr., and many others, the body of material . Lomax also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1935);[14] with John Wesley Work III and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts[15] and Jean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean (1961); with Shirley Collins in Great Britain and the Southeastern US (1959); with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs", Lomax told the audience. The individual programs reached ten million students in 200,000 U.S. classrooms and were also broadcast in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, but both Lomax and his father felt that the concept of the shows, which portrayed folk music as mere raw material for orchestral music, was deeply flawed and failed to do justice to vernacular culture. .. Nathan Salsburg never met Alan Lomax, the famed American musicologist. I believe this is one of the most important books ever written about music, in my all time top ten. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. Yes, he's here, he's made a trip out to see me. LOVE OVER GOLD. In withdrawing him (in addition to not being able to afford the tuition), the elder Lomax had probably wanted to separate his son from new political associates that he considered undesirable. [48], The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice. . The elder Lomax, a former professor of English at Texas A&M and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the University of Texas. Thank you Brittany Haas for the wonderful fiddle! He was a musicologist, writer, producer, and musician and spent much of his life gathering field recordings of folk music. From 1942 to 1979 Lomax was repeatedly investigated and interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), although nothing incriminating was ever discovered and the investigation was eventually abandoned. Sublabels. Someday the deal will change. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper, The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states, known colloquially as the Southern Journey, lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Wade Ward, Charlie Higgins and Bessie Jones and culminated in the discovery of Fred McDowell. The estate of Alan Lomax, Haitan scholar, and the Library of Congress have joined forces to produce a chronicle of Lomax's 1936 Haitan recording expedition in collaboration with The Association for Cultural Equity. It's necessary to put your hand on the artist while he sings. The Association's mission is to "facilitate cultural equity" and practice "cultural feedback" and "preserve, publish, repatriate and freely disseminate" its collections. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for . Finally back in print! . So if we've got anybody to thank, it's Alan. Subsequently, Lomax was one of the performers listed in the publication Red Channels as a possible Communist sympathizer and was consequently blacklisted from working in US entertainment industries. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. "[35], For the Scottish, English, and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy, Scots poet Hamish Henderson, and with the Irish folklorist Samus Ennis,[36] recording among others, Margaret Barry and the songs in Irish of Elizabeth Cronin; Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson; and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, and interviewing some of these performers at length about their lives. Alan Lomax started making recordings for the Library of Congress in 1933, with his father John, and recorded folk music and interviews from around the United States and the world on reel-to-reel tape between 1946 and 1991.