“The main point of my activity,” Lomax once remarked, “was. Lomax also built on the interest created by his books, records, and broadcasts with concert series such as The Midnight Special at Town Hall, which brought 1940s New Yorkers blues, flamenco, calypso, and Southern ballad singing, all still relatively unknown genres. American Folk Songs, Wellsprings of Music, and the prime-time series, Back Where I Come From, exposed national audiences to regional American music and such homegrown talents as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Josh White, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. In 1939, while doing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University, he produced the first of several radio series for CBS.
#JOHN AND ALAN LOMAX ARCHIVE#
The next year, Lomax was appointed Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folk Song. Their collecting resulted in several popular and influential anthologies of American folk songs, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1934) Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (New York: Macmillan, 1936), the first in depth biographical study of an American folk musician Our Singing Country (with Ruth Crawford Seeger) (New York: Macmillian, 1941) and Folk Song USA (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce 1947).Īfter completing a philosophy degree at the University of Texas in 1936, Lomax conducted field research in Haiti with his wife, Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold. In 1934, the two launched an effort to expand the holdings of recorded folk music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (established 1928), gathering thousands of field recordings of folk musicians throughout the American South, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast, as well as in Haiti and the Bahamas.
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He began his career in 1933 alongside his father, the pioneering folklorist John Avery Lomax, author of the best-selling Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). Austin, Texas, 1915) spent over six decades working to promote knowledge and appreciation of the world’s folk music.
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Musicologist, writer, and producer Alan Lomax (b.