ALAN LOMAX 1915 - 2002
FOLK MUSIC'S FOREMOST PIONEER & ETHNOMUSICOLOGIST DIES
Alan Lomax passed away on the morning of July 19, 2002. Alan Lomax is
survived by his loving daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis of Holiday, FL; his
devoted 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.
Funeral Services for Alan Lomax
Vinson Funeral Home
456 East Tarpon Avenue
Tarpon Springs, FL 34689
Services on Tuesday July 23, 2002
Viewing 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 http://www.alan-lomax.com
For more information, contact:
Jeff Walker - jeffw@rounder.com <mailto:jeffw@rounder.com> , or Ryan McMaken
- ryanm@rounder.com <mailto:ryanm@rounder.com>
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Janice "Busgal" Brooks
ICQ 44729047
Rip Alan Lomax
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Alan Lomax probably did more for American music than any other person in the 20th century. His life made a difference - it changed the course of musical history. We are all in his debt.
Thank you, Mr. Lomax.
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<small><img align=right src="http://b0b.com/b0b.gif" width="64" height="64">Bobby Lee - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs
Sierra Session 12 (E9), Williams 400X (Emaj9, D6), Sierra Olympic 12 (F Diatonic) Sierra Laptop 8 (D13), Fender Stringmaster (E13, A6)
Thank you, Mr. Lomax.
------------------
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<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica">quote:</font><HR><SMALL><b><center>Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
By JON PARELES - NY Times</center></b>
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."
</SMALL><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
By JON PARELES - NY Times</center></b>
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."
</SMALL><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
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As far as I'm concerned, Lomax's greatest discovery was Fred McDowell, whom he discovered in 1959 while on a field trip to record "folk music." The first result of that trip was a 7 LP set on Atlantic records called the Southern Folk Heritage Series. Later Prestige records released a dozen more albums from the same set of recordings.
Interestingly, Lomax didn't realize just how great McDowell was at the time, and pretty much dismissed him as just another example of a Mississippi Delta slide guitarist. In his notes to the set, Lomax barely mentioned McDowell at all, and concentrated instead on a singer named Forest City Joe who died in a car accident (at age 35) shortly after the recordings were made. It was Chris Strachwitz at Arhoolie records who, upon hearing Lomax's recording of McDowell, recognized his greatness and went to Mississippi to record him some more, and launched his career.
But credit for McDowell's discovery goes to Lomax. Without him, nobody would have ever heard McDowell and his wonderful music would have been lost to the world.
Interestingly, Lomax didn't realize just how great McDowell was at the time, and pretty much dismissed him as just another example of a Mississippi Delta slide guitarist. In his notes to the set, Lomax barely mentioned McDowell at all, and concentrated instead on a singer named Forest City Joe who died in a car accident (at age 35) shortly after the recordings were made. It was Chris Strachwitz at Arhoolie records who, upon hearing Lomax's recording of McDowell, recognized his greatness and went to Mississippi to record him some more, and launched his career.
But credit for McDowell's discovery goes to Lomax. Without him, nobody would have ever heard McDowell and his wonderful music would have been lost to the world.