Who is alan lomax

Black is beautiful. Appalachia is beautiful, and even old, tired, Washington sometimes is beautiful when the American people gather to sing and fall in love with each other again. In , he was awarded the National Medal of Arts for his accomplishments. Culture of, by, and for the People.

Browse By. Legacy Honorees. Alan Lomax. In , Lomax compiled The Folk Songs of North America , which helped fuel the burgeoning folk revival, and also earned him a place on the organising committee of the Newport folk festival.

It was there, in , that he helped try to sabotage Bob Dylan's sound system, and had his semi-legendary altercation with Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman.

According to March, this was further proof that Lomax "hated rock'n'roll because it had no need of mediation by experts like himself". Like many pioneers, Lomax was, at heart, a purist, someone who believed in the unquestionable importance of his calling, and whose self-belief was unleavened by either tact or self-doubt. For all that, he was an important figure, a catalyst not just for the s folk and blues revivals that posthumously acknowledged the importance of pioneers like of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and Son House, but for contemporary American roots music and for what is now known as world music.

Szwed's exhaustive biography illustrates in some detail the reasons for Lomax's importance while sometimes sidestepping the problematic nature of his great undertaking, and the often-compromising ways in which he pursued it. But was he really the selfless pioneer that this biography claims? Alan Lomax, who, along with his father, John, contributed an estimated 3, songs to the Library of Congress recordings archive.

Reuse this content. Alan also hosted several nationally broadcast radio shows designed to encourage music appreciation among younger listeners. Until , when Congress cut off the Library of Congress' funding for song collecting, Alan, his father, and various other collaborators contributed more than 10, field recordings to the archive.

After that, Alan continued to collect and record indigenous music independently, traveling around the United States as well as Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the Caribbean. Through Lomax, Seeger also met Woody Guthrie, with whom he played under many different circumstances. Yet, it was Lomax who figured strongly in the revival of Guthrie's flagging career.

Besides encouraging the hardluck performer to recommit to writing and getting him to record his works for the Library of Congress, Lomax featured him on a primetime CBS radio program he produced, Back Where I Come From. Years later, Lomax observed that the best years of his life were spent working with Guthrie and Leadbelly. Whether serving as producer, writer, or singing host, radio proved an important educational tool for Lomax.

Some projects, such as CBS's School of the Air , where he attempted to have folk music orchestrated and played like a symphony, simply did not work. Others like American Folk Songs, Wellsprings of Music , and the live Midnight Special broadcasts from Town Hall were successful in communicating what was special about folk and blues music to mass audiences.

These shows also provided valuable exposure for such artists as Guthrie, Seeger, Leadbelly, White, the Golden Gate Quartet, and up-and-coming folk revivalist Burl Ives.

However, such high profile projects did not quell his compulsive need to go out into the field and seek new recordings. Traveling with Fisk University musicologist John Work, Lomax made a famous trek into the Deep South in and , where he documented the music and stories of the fife and drum bluesmen, and conducted the first recordings and interviews with McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters.

In his book The Land Where Blues Began , Lomax described the sessions that would kick-start the singer's highly influential career. There was nothing uncertain about his performances. He sang and played with such finesse, with such a mercurial and sensitive bond between voice and guitar, and he expressed so much tenderness in the way he handled his lyrics, that he went right beyond all his predecessors—Blind Lemon, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown.

When they met the former cotton chopper was driving a Cadillac, while Lomax was still driving an old Ford. When the Library of Congress decided they could no longer fund Lomax's expeditions, which were mostly done on a shoestring budget, he left them in More importantly, he fed the fires of the burgeoning folk music revival by signing on as the director of folk music at Decca Records. Yet, he spent most of the s in Great Britain, where he began his hunt for the folk music of the British Isles, eventually releasing his findings on the ten-disc set Folksongs of Great Britain When he returned to the United states, Lomax revisited the Deep South where he continued documenting African-American culture.