Alan Lomax
January 31, 1915 — July 19, 2002
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist and folklorist who spent six decades travelling the United States and the world with recording equipment, preserving the songs, stories, and voices of people who would otherwise have gone unheard, collecting over 17,500 recordings for the Library of Congress and introducing the world to Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, and many others.
Son of a Folklorist
Born on January 31, 1915 in Austin, Texas, Alan Lomax was the son of John Avery Lomax, himself a pioneering folk music collector who had helped establish the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Alan began assisting his father on collecting trips as a teenager, and by the time he was 18 he was travelling independently with recording equipment, capturing performances in prisons, churches, lumber camps, and rural communities across the American South. In 1933, the Lomaxes recorded Huddie Ledbetter — known as Leadbelly — at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Lomax was instrumental in bringing Leadbelly to the attention of Northern audiences, launching the folk revival that would reshape American popular music over the next three decades.
The Library of Congress Years
Lomax joined the Library of Congress formally in 1937, becoming the first curator of the Archive of Folk Song, and immediately began expanding the collection. He recorded Muddy Waters in Mississippi in 1941, introduced him to a Chicago producer, and set in motion the chain of events that eventually produced electric blues. He recorded Woody Guthrie extensively and helped bring him to New York, where Guthrie became the defining voice of political folk music. Lomax also recorded Jelly Roll Morton's extended oral history of jazz in 1938 — a priceless document of music that was barely 30 years old at the time. His collecting missions took him to the Appalachians, the Mississippi Delta, the Caribbean, and eventually to Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, where he continued to document traditional music in the 1950s and 1960s.
Did You Know?
When Lomax recorded Muddy Waters at the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi in 1941, Waters was a 28-year-old sharecropper who had never left his home state. Lomax sent him a copy of the recording, which was the first time Waters had ever heard himself on record. Waters later said the recording convinced him he had something to offer, and he moved to Chicago the following year. The rest of Waters's life — his electric blues, his influence on the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and countless others — flows from that moment.
Global Vision and Later Work
Lomax's approach was not merely archival; he was a theorist, writer, and broadcaster who believed folk music carried essential truths about the societies that produced it. He coined the term "cantometrics" to describe his systematic cross-cultural analysis of musical style. In later life he developed a project called the Global Jukebox, an attempt to encode his decades of cross-cultural recordings into a database that could demonstrate patterns in world music. He wrote several major books, including The Land Where the Blues Began (1993), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He suffered a stroke in 1995 that severely limited his activity, and he died on July 19, 2002 in Safety Harbor, Florida. His archive, now held by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, contains recordings, photographs, and documentation of immeasurable cultural value.