/ARTS WEEKLY/MUSIC-U.S.: Roots Music Pioneer Alan Lomax Dies

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 23 2002 (IPS) - Perhaps the world’s most influential explorer and collector of what is today called “roots music” and a long-time political radical, Alan Lomax, died Friday at his home in Florida, at the age of 87.

Lomax, who believed that folk traditions were the DNA of human culture, travelled throughout the United States and later to the English-speaking Caribbean, the British Isles, western Europe and beyond, to record thousands upon thousands of otherwise unknown musicians, inspiring hundreds of ethno-musicologists world-wide in his 70-year career.

The music he recorded, from cowboys’ campfires in the American Southwest to brutal prison camps in the deep South to prayer meetings in the dirt-poor hollows of the 1930s Appalachian Mountains, similarly inspired scores of groups and musicians, including the Beatles, who used the sounds of the old ’78’ record discs to create the pop music of the last 40 years.

As British musician, producer, and artist Brian Eno put it recently, “Without Lomax, it’s possible there would be no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles, [Rolling] Stones [or] Velvet Underground.”

His most famous “discoveries” – men who later became legends in their own time – included Huddie Ledbetter, whom he first recorded at Louisiana’s Angola prison in 1933, where the man who came to be known as Leadbelly was serving out a prison term for aggravated assault.

Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, and other great bluesmen out of the Mississippi Delta were also featured on Lomax recordings.

Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma dirt farmer whose songs, including ‘This Land is Your Land’, became the anthems of the populist energy released in the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, was a Lomax treasure, as was “Jelly Roll” Morton, the pianist often credited with virtually inventing jazz in New Orleans in the early 20th century.

“He purposely tried his best to infect us with these songs,” said Pete Seeger, a singer and founder of ‘The Weavers’, a New York City-based folk group that almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for the 1960s folk revival that gave birth to the careers of Bob Dylan (whose idol was Guthrie), Joan Baez, and many others.

Lomax came by his interest from his father John, a Texas folklorist who travelled the southwestern states in the early years of the century recording songs of the dying cowboy culture, including ‘Home on the Range’. Virtually alone, he created the Archive of American Folk Song, now at the Library of Congress in Washington.

But while his father was committed to collecting music for largely academic reasons, Alan’s motivation was far more political. As he explained in an interview on National Public Radio some years ago, “I was a student and a radical, and I wanted to go along (with my father) and see what was happening in the South.”

“I knew what was said in Texas and the South – that blacks were perfectly content – was a lot of hooey, but I couldn’t prove it.”

Roosevelt’s New Deal fitted Lomax’s populist beliefs and ambitions to a tee. His mission was, in his words, to record “the voice of the common people”.

“Radio was full of big bands in those days,” Seeger told an interviewer at National Public Radio last weekend, but there was a lot of good music that was made by relatively illiterate people, people off in the mountains of Kentucky, and people in the chain gangs of Mississippi.”

“He was a young fellow (who) was out to make America more democratic and he thought American folk music could help do the job.”

It was in that spirit that, backed by the Library of Congress and the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), Lomax, sometimes with his father and others with collaborators like the great Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, travelled one end of the country to the other seeking those voices.

He also insisted that the artists he recorded talk about their own lives and music. “I found out that what I was really doing, and my father was really doing, was giving an avenue for people to express themselves and tell their side of the story,” he said in 1991.

Long before the word “globalisation” made its debut in the 1990s, Lomax saw his role as putting “neglected cultures and silenced people into the communications chain”, to preserve local traditions in the face of a commercial market that was becoming national and would soon be international.

“We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they’re not like him,” he once said.

“Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities,” he added.

“My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.”

Lomax always tried to make local singers understand better how important they were to preserving musical traditions. He made it a practice, particularly in the 1930s and ’40s, to play back his recordings so that the musicians could hear themselves.

“This was a tremendous experience for people who may have been isolated in their own communities,” he said.

Lomax spent much of the 1950s ¡ when the anti-communism of the McCarthy era made it much more difficult for folk musicians like Seeger to gain access to a mass audience – in Britain and other parts of Europe doing much the same things.

As noted in the ‘New York Times’, he introduced rural American music to Britain, sparking the skiffle craze that eventually yielded groups like the Quarry Men, John Lennon’s first band.

In 1962, he travelled to the West Indies where he recorded traditional music of English, French, and Spanish-speaking islands, including the Hindu community of Trinidad.

Throughout his career, he not only recorded and produced for the enormous collection of the Library of Congress and other collections of commercial labels. In the 1960s he published ‘The Penguin Book of American Folksongs’ and ‘Folk Song Style and Culture’.

In 1967, he published with Seeger and Guthrie ‘Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People’, a book that he could not get published during the McCarthy period.

In the 1980s, Lomax produced a critically acclaimed television documentary series called ‘American Patchwork’, which dealt with various forms of American music. In 1993, he published ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’, an account of his work from the 1930s to the 1980s, for which he won the National Book Award.

In the late 1980s, he also developed the ‘Global Jukebox’, an inter-active software project that studies connections between music and dance from around the world.

Despite having two strokes, he also continued working with Rounder Records on the Lomax Collection, a 100-CD series of his recordings, about 15 of which have been issued since 1997.