Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. He recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress.
About Alan Lomax in brief
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. He recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. In March 2004 the material captured and produced without Library ofCongress funding was acquired by the Library, which now houses the entire archive. Among the artists he 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, and country blues singer Lead Belly, among many others. In his late seventies he completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began, linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South. He also advised the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research. His greatest legacy is in preserving and publishing recordings of musicians in many folk and blues traditions around the US and Europe.
He is buried at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied philosophy and wrote a few columns for the school’s paper, The Daily Texan. His son, John, is also a well-known scholar and author, and is the author of several books on folk music and the history of the American blues. He died of cancer in 2012. He leaves behind a wife and four children. He had a son, David, and a daughter, Jennifer. He lived in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children. His last will and testament will be published in May 2013, and he is survived by his wife, Jennifer, and their three children, David and Jennifer. The couple had no children of their own, but had two step-grandchildren and a step-great-grandchild. He will be buried in Texas, near his wife’s hometown of Austin, with whom he spent much of his time collecting folk music. He has a brother, John A. Lomax, who is a noted historian and author. His father was a former professor of English at Texas A&M and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the Universityof Texas. He and his sister, Bess Brown, were the youngest of four children born to Bess, a pioneering folklorists and author who died at the age of 10, in 1936. He spent his second year there reading philosophy and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs.
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