AFC recommends that queries relating to publication be forwarded to AFC. AFC facilitates this process, providing what contact information it has.
For publication use, the American Folklife Center asks patrons to make a good faith effort to contact rights holders and deposit written permission at AFC. Some rights are held by the performers, and other rights may exist. The Library of Congress owns the original Alan Lomax recordings, but holds no copyright or intellectual property rights to these recordings. These later collections are administered and made available online by the Association for Cultural Equity, the non-profit research center that Alan Lomax founded in 1983.
The Lomax Collection at the AFC also contains the many hundreds of tape recordings, photographs, and moving images Alan Lomax compiled after his departure from the Library of Congress in 1944 to his retirement in the mid-1990s.
#John and allen lomax archive
The American Folklife Center, of which the archive is now part, is the physical repository of all of the recordings made by the Lomaxes in this era, in Kentucky and many other states, as well as in the Bahamas and Haiti. Alan Lomax served as Assistant In Charge of the Archive of Folk Song from 1937 to 1942. Lomax was appointed Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, a title he held until his death in 1948. He returned in 1933 under the auspices of the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folk Song and with eighteen-year-old son Alan the pair stopped in Harlan County, where they made their first sound recordings in the state.Īlan returned with his wife Elizabeth for an extensive trip through ten eastern counties in 1937, and visited twice more on behalf of the Library in 19. John Lomax’s earliest Kentucky travels included a 1932 visit to Berea College where he lectured about his cowboy-song collecting and sought out mountain ballads from faculty and students. Szwed admirably captures the efforts of a man who seemed determined to honor what came before him.Home > About the Project > John and Alan Lomax John and Alan Lomax Lomax helped reconnect American music with its roots in folk traditions, and his story is an important one for anyone with an interest in cultural history. It turned out somebody had told the FBI he was a threat, thus beginning the FBI's decades-long interest in Lomax. He was there to sing for the president, first lady and the king and queen of England, but "everywhere he went in the White House" the Secret Service jostled him in an attempt to frisk him. Among many interesting anecdotes is one about Lomax's 1939 performance at the White House. Among the names that pop up as he is out collecting and, later, putting on concerts are the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and singer-songwriters Woody Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Lomax's story is filled with interesting trips and, like the man himself, never seems to stop in one place for very long. By comparison, when the film director Nicholas Ray dies, Szwed devotes several lines to the ceremony and quotes from Lomax's eulogy for his friend. John's death gets only a quick mention, and we don't learn much of anything about his son's reaction. Yet Szwed writes that, at age 23, Alan was "on the verge of becoming the best-known folklorist in America, but self-doubt haunted him." Did he want to do the work, or was he living out his father's dream? The book barely touches on Lomax's conflicted feelings in this regard.
#John and allen lomax how to
This time on the road learning how to become "a messenger for the masses" changed Alan's life. Himself a folklorist, John Lomax took his son into the field to collect, setting him on the path toward his life's work. But Szwed skimps on the kind of personal material that might have humanized his subject.Ĭonsider Lomax's relationship with his father. His biography is rich in detail, thoroughly explaining Lomax's methods of music collection as well as his movement into crafting books, concerts, festivals and radio programs. John Szwed, a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University, knew Lomax personally. Although he started out collecting folk music in the rural South, he eventually traveled the world finding and classifying song and dance. Lomax, who famously scoured the United States and the world collecting folk music, was an archivist, producer, anthropologist, singer, political activist and theorist, to name just a few of his roles. Reading about Alan Lomax (1915-2002) can make a person feel very, very lazy.