Alan Lomax

person · earth

An American folklorist who spent more than sixty years recording musicians in the field, first alongside his father John A. Lomax for the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song and later on his own account across the United States, the Caribbean, Britain, Ireland, Spain and Italy. The recordings that matter most to this Journey are early and specific. In July 1933 the Lomaxes recorded Huddie Ledbetter — Lead Belly — at Angola prison farm in Louisiana. In 1938 Alan Lomax recorded Jelly Roll Morton at length in the Library of Congress, producing the sessions in which Morton set out the Caribbean rhythmic component of early New Orleans jazz. In the summer of 1941, on a trip run jointly by the Library of Congress and Fisk University, he and the Fisk musicologist John W. Work III recorded McKinley Morganfield — Muddy Waters — at Stovall Farm near Clarksdale, and returned in 1942. Lomax was also the collector who most explicitly argued that the music he was recording was a system with structure worth analysing rather than folklore, and the reasons to be uneasy about a white collector's authority over Black repertoire apply to him as squarely as to anyone.

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