In Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys (a tiny prep school), where he excelled. The elder Lomax, a former professor of English at Texas A&M and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the University of Texas.īecause of childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, Lomax had mostly been home schooled in elementary school. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Lomax, born in Austin, Texas in 1915, was the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneering folklorist and author John A. 1.2 Assistant in Charge and Commercial Records and Radio Broadcasts.In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.
Allan lomax series#
In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax 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 (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox).
![allan lomax allan lomax](https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5929b0d0c0084474cd0c1cf8/1:1/w_600/4c7decdd.jpeg)
In March 2004 the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which 'brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.' With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward.
Allan lomax archive#
Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.Īfter 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. During the New Deal, with his father, folklorist and collector John A. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.
![allan lomax allan lomax](https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/files/2015/01/afc2014008_alan_1940s2.jpg)
He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Alan Lomax (Janu– July 19, 2002) was an American field collector of folk music of the 20th century.