Alan Lomax

[Tim Szeliga]

Just downloaded John Szwed's new biography

Alan Lomax -- The Man who Recorded the World.

 

Very enjoyable and a peek into the OTR world from

an oblique angle.  I did a quick google on Lomax and didn't find much

available for free, just lying around.  Quite a bit expensively pre-packaged

and for sale. I mean, the stuff is over 75 years old and was gathered

at taxpayer expense for the Library of Congress.  Isn't that Public

Domain by definition?

 

Alan and his father were

dragging hundreds of pounds of disc-cutting recorders

and acid-filled batteries to Texas prisons and Mississippi

plantations, to capture folk music in its most natural state,

even as radio and pop music were erasing it.

 

Later Alan's wife was the breadwinner, writing radio scripts

and working with Norman Corwin and others.  Alan

had a show, off and on, and much is made of the uncertain

life in radio, working from show to show, trying to find

sponsors (though in Lomax's case, the big Rockeffeller

and Guggenheim foundations, rather than Lever Brothers

and Bristol Meyers advertisers).  The book also recounts

his championing of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly

and their radio appearances. 

 

Less is made of the McCarthy era;  seems Alan took the

opportunity to go folk song collecting in Europe for several

years, until things cooled down.  Integrationism is a theme;

his father studied negro culture, but didn't particularly like them.

Alan would prefer Leadbelly's company to Ralph Bunche's or

Thurgood Marshall's.  I haven't finish the book yet.  Curious

to see his role in the civil rights era.

 

As he got older, his mania for collecting waned and was

replaced by a mania for systematizing and categorizing

Folklore into a scientific discipline.  From what I gather

from the charitable comments in the book and some nastier

ones in blogs, his gifts were as a recordist, making people

feel at ease and willing to sing into that scary box. 

Scientists are split into theorists and experimentalists;

they don't naturally evolve from one to the other as they age.

 

As Steve Martin said about the great folk music scare:
Can you believe that shit almost caught on?

[Paul Hudson]

He was indeed a star.