Skip to main content

The Digital Lomax Archive Provides Free Access to the Pioneering Recordings of John & Alan Lomax, Compiled Across 7 Decades

The work of ethnomusicologist father and son team John and Alan Lomax was intended to preserve the local musical cultures of the United States and regions around the world against an encroaching mass media threatening to erase them. But the thousands of Lomax recordings, films, books, articles, and other documents not only conserved regional music; they also helped transform mass culture by introducing local forms that have since become part of a global musical grammar. Lomax and his son Alan — “the man who recorded the world,” as biographer John Szwed called him — popularized folk music thirty years before Dylan recorded his first album and were among the first white listeners to recognize the genius of Robert Johnson.

Alan Lomax began traveling the country with his father in 1933. In 1939, “while doing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University,” notes a biography at Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity, “he produced the first of several radio series for CBS. American Folk Songs, Wellsprings of Music, and the prime-time series, Back Where I Come From, exposed national audiences to regional American music and such homegrown talents as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Josh White, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger,” who described Lomax as “more responsible than any other person for the twentieth-century folk song revival.”

Alan Lomax brought blues, flamenco, calypso, and Southern ballad singing, “all still relatively unknown genres,” to New York in the 1940s with concert series like The Midnight Special at Town Hall. “The main point of my activity,” he once said, “was… to put sound technology at the disposal of The Folk, to bring channels of communication to all sorts of artists and areas.” A performer himself, he coined the term “cultural equity” to describe this work, a means of advocating for musical cultures left behind by commercialization, the “cultural gray-out,” as he called it. From his first field recordings in 1933 to his 1993 Land Where the Blues Began, which earned a National Book Critics Award, he stayed true to that mission.

Lomax and his father’s work has been “compiled across seven decades” by the Lomax Digital Archive, which provides free and open access to “the entirety of Alan’s photographs and open-reel tape recordings — made between 1946 and 1991… as well as transcriptions of his 1940s radio programs, and a selection of clips from his film and video-work of the 1970s and 1980s.” This huge, searchable library supplements already massive Lomax collections online, such as that housed at the Association for Cultural Equity, and includes “the entire 70 hours of their Kentucky recordings and the 39 hours of Mississippi recordings,” notes a press release. “This latter material includes the first recordings of Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Sid Hemphill.”

Furthermore, the Lomax Digital Archive features online exhibits that “allow for thoughtful, context-rich explorations into specific aspects of the collection.” The first presentation, “Trouble Won’t Last Always,” compiles songs from a series launched during the pandemic that “speak to themes of loneliness, isolation, optimism, endurance, transcendence..,” all universal human experiences. Lomax believed, his daughter Anna Lomax Wood said, “that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field. Not that they’re all alike. But that they should be given the same dignity.” His own dignified approach helped ensure that we could hear and learn from local historical voices from around the world even as economic and political inequities sought to silence them for good. Enter the Lomax Digital Archive here.

Related Content: 

Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 17,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings

New, Interactive Web Site Puts Online Thousands of International Folk Songs Recorded by the Great Folklorist Alan Lomax

Stream 35 Hours of Classic Blues, Folk, & Bluegrass Recordings from Smithsonian Folkways: 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Digital Lomax Archive Provides Free Access to the Pioneering Recordings of John & Alan Lomax, Compiled Across 7 Decades is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3tynI90
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more