Alan James Lomax, the son of pioneering musicologist and folklorist John Avery Lomax, was born in Austin, Texas. A highly intelligent youth, Lomax traveled with his father to collect songs in the South, publishing his first paper as a teenager. At sixteen years of age, he entered the University of Texas at Austin, and then applied for a scholarship to Harvard University, which he attended for a year, but ill health led him to join his father in fieldwork for the Library of Congress collecting folk songs. Lomax’s career soon eclipsed his father’s, and he became a highly prolific folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and political activist. Lomax became known as one of the greatest American field collectors for twentieth-century folk music and a promoter of multiculturalism.
The Great Depression was a turning point for the Lomaxes; after an epic journey collecting thousands of songs, Alan began to have revelations about the power of the simple tunes that they recorded. He began to wonder what exactly gave strength and spirit to the singers as their voices soared, singing simple repetitive phrases with embellishments such as: “Healin’ water done move / Healin’ water done move/ Soul is happy now / Healin’ water done move.” Alan was compelled to follow the music; the father and son team co-authored American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, which was published in 1936. Prominent African American writer Richard Wright was highly critical of how the Lomaxes focused on Lead Belly and prison songs, bypassing richer narratives of contemporary black life in the South.
Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father, John Lomax (1867–1948), gathered, studied, and recorded a vast array of folk songs from around the country. Lomax recorded thousands of songs for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in the field. Lomax also recorded interviews as part of his field work, thus allowing his informants to speak for themselves and earning a reputation as an oral historian. (Cornell Capa/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Though he appeared larger than life, Lomax lived most of his adult life as a bohemian, never achieving the affluence or stability of a traditional academic; he recorded thousands of songs for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress while on the road. Lomax’s best work was done in the field; he initially took down interviews with a typewriter, but recording them allowed him to preserve the context and style of informants. After earning his degree from the University of Texas, Lomax and his wife Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold traveled to Haiti where Lomax conducted his first independent fieldwork with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle. He enrolled at the University of California to do graduate work in anthropology, but did not finish. However, this training was evident in his work as the director of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, as he garnered this position at only twenty-one.
Informants trusted Lomax, who had a flair for the dramatic; he had a poetic turn of phrase and understood that folk songs are born, have a life, and then fade into obscurity. Therefore, Lomax became known for collecting what was offered. Between 1937 and 1942 he became a pioneering oral historian, interviewing musicians such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, and others. In 1937, he and wife Elizabeth moved to New York and later Lomax studied part-time with German-born musicologist Curt Sachs at New York University where Sachs was a proponent of building music archives. In New York, Lomax made contacts with several record labels and in 1939, he hosted a television series called American Folk Songs and Wellsprings of Music for CBS’s “American School of the Air.”
Lomax did not always conform to academic standards, but he was at the epicenter of New Deal WPA politics while still in his early twenties and was able to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities to record folk artists. He introduced the first “concept” albums for RCA, including Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly’s Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs. Lomax promoted traditional American music, but his activism and growing connections with the folk music Left in Greenwich Village made him a target of false accusations; when he visited First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the Secret Service was tipped by a woman identifying herself as Lomax’s aunt that he might be a terrorist. Lomax received a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved into the commercial recording arena.
Lomax and his sister Bess supported the civil rights movement along with other folk music activists including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White. While based in New York, Lomax collaborated with prominent black pioneering sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson (1893–1956), who was the first black president of Fisk University, to study the relationships between music and society. Johnson brought entrepreneurship to the cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance after being a researcher for the National Urban League, which was the oldest American community-based civil rights organization fighting against racial discrimination of African Americans. Johnson established and edited the publication Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life.
Lomax’s work often honored and chronicled the contributions of black singers in his books, films, and recordings. While working for the Library of Congress Lomax heard New Orleans ragtime-jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941) playing the piano in a bar called the Music Box, and invited him to record songs and be interviewed at the Library of Congress. Morton embellished the facts of his life, and Lomax immortalized it in his book Mister Jelly Roll (1950), where he used New Orleans “Creole” as a racial identifier for jazz music.
From 1942 to 1979, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) repeatedly investigated and interviewed Lomax on his political sympathies and involvement in protests. In 1947, Lomax asserted that American folklore had broken away from its European roots to reflect American values, and he moved his studies into the jazz scene. By association, Lomax was “redlisted” as a Communist sympathizer along with noteworthy folk singers Burl Ives and Pete Seeger, which prompted him to relocate to London for a project for Columbia Records because he was banned from working in any aspect of the American entertainment industry.
Between 1950 and 1958, London served as Lomax’s home base while he conducted field recordings in Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Spain. While in England, he edited an eighteen-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, and developed recordings for the BBC that appeared on British television. Lomax returned to the United States in 1958 and Seeger welcomed him back, warning him of the changes that had taken place in the folk music scene and politics. Lomax wrote an article called “The ‘Folkniks’ and the Songs they Sing,” about the city-dwelling (or “city-billy”) folk singers.
When the ABC television show Hootenanny refused to allow Pete Seeger and the Weavers to appear due to past radicalism in early 1963, Lomax organized a boycott with other folk music performers. Lomax recognized that folk music and culture emerged at the local level and flourished through cultural exchange and not in isolation. He established the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) in 1983 at Hunter College in New York City. During the late 1980s, Lomax produced a documentary series called American Patchwork that spotlighted various forms of American music.
Meredith Eliassen
See also American Folklore Society (AFS); Ballad; Blues as Folklore; Hurston, Zora Neale
Further Reading
Lomax, Alan. 1959. “The ‘Folkniks’ and the Songs They Sing,” Sing Out! 9 (1, Summer): 3–31.
Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Lomax, Alan. 2013. The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax: Words, Photographs, and Music; with an Essay by Tom Piazza; Introduction by William R. Ferris. New York: Library of Congress and W. W. Norton.
Szwed, John F. 2010. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin.