Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The Men Behind The Bluesmen: Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was born on January 15, in 1915 and he passed away on July 19, in 2002. He was an American folklorist and musicologist who did a great deal to help popularize blues music.

He was one of the great and best known field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He and his father John Lomax, recorded thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the West Indies, Italy, and Spain.

According to Wikipedia;

A pioneering oral historian, he also recorded substantial interviews with many legendary folk musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, Irish singer Margaret Barry, Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson, and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, among many others. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor he took his recording machine into the streets to capture the reactions of everyday citizens. While serving in the army in World War II he made numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera," The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.

The article at Wikipedia on Alan Lomax is a must read.


DVDs by Alan Lomax @Amazon.com



Lomax the Songhunter
~ Alan Lomax (DVD - 2008)




American Patchwork: The Land Where the Blues Began
~ Jack Owens, Sam Chatmon, and Othar Turner (DVD - 1990)




American Patchwork- Jazz Parades
~ Alan Lomax (DVD - 2006)



Alan Lomax @SqueezeMyLemon


3 comments:

mister anchovy said...

He was a giant, and not just in the blues world.

Unknown said...

Fitzgerald,
Please understand that I don't wish to take anything away from Lomax's contribution to music, but his forays would not have been possible had it not been for John W. Work, and two other scholars from Fisk University. It seems that a manuscript of Work's was found behind a file drawer where it is believed it was deliberately hidden for over 60 years.

In a book entitled "Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942" authors Gordon and Nemerov have rescued from oblivion an important study of black life in rural Mississippi.

Famed folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 for The Land Where the Blues Began, his memoir about recording Southern blues music 50 years earlier. Lomax, however, made scant mention of his research associates, three African-American scholars from Fisk University in Nashville—composer-musicologist Work, sociologist Jones and graduate student Adams—who made significant, valuable contributions.

Work's 160 song transcriptions of 1941–1942 field recordings form the 100-page centerpiece of this book, and equally illuminating are insightful essays by the Fisk trio on plantation folklore and traditions, already fading at that time as urban influences permeated the Mississippi Delta.

Although a joint Fisk–Library of Congress publication was originally planned, the once-lost Fisk manuscripts have never seen print until now. More than a few editorial comments hint at the conflicts involving Lomax: "That the manuscripts were found in the Lomax archives six decades after they went missing may reveal much about how research is, and is not, shared, attributed, and published.

Regarding Work here is a paragraph from Wikipedia which on the Work/Lomax connection:

Following Work's collection Negro Folk Songs, the bulk of which was recorded at Fort Valley, he and two colleagues from Fisk University, Charles S. Johnson, head of the department of sociology (later, in October 1946, chosen as the university's first black president), and Lewis Jones, professor of sociology, collaborated with the Archive of American Folk Song on the Library of Congress/Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection (AFC 1941/002). This project was a two-year joint field study conducted by the Library of Congress and Fisk University during the summers of 1941 and 1942. The goal of the partnership was to carry out an intensive field study documenting the folk culture of a specific community of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta region. The rapidly urbanizing commercial area of Coahoma County, Mississippi, with its county seat in Clarksdale, became the geographical focus of the study. Some of the correspondence included in this collection between Work and Alan Lomax, then head of the Archive of American Folk Song, touches on both the Fort Valley and the emerging Fisk University recording projects.

As you may remember, at the time that Lomax did his field studies, there was a deep segregation of the races, particularly in the rural south and the Jim Crow laws. John W. Work III was a black man. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5024892

For more on this matter and misconceptions regarding the Blues, I would recommend a scholarly article entitled "Negritude 2.0, Retelling the History of Black Music: Everything You Know about the Blues Is Wrong." It is written by Mark Reynolds.

Here is a link:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/retelling-the-history-of-black-music-everything-you-know-about-the-blues-is/

In it, Reynolds references several books on the matter. Well worth a read.

fitzgerald said...

Mr. King, thanks so much for your very interesting comment. Please come back and drop science (as the kids like to say) on us any time.

As for the details of your comment, please see Blues Ain't just Frat Boys Music http://squeezemylemon.blogspot.com/2006/05/blues-aint-just-frat-boys-music.html a post from back in 2005 where I mention Mr. Work. And thanks for pointing out the great work done by John W. Work and scholars from Fisk University (as a graduate from a historically Black college it warms my heart to see Fisk University being given credit for their good work). I will probably use your comment as a jumping off point for another post along those lines.

Having said that, in your comment you said, "... I don't wish to take anything away from Lomax's contribution to music ..." this is a good thing, because it would be very difficult to diminish the good work of Mr. Lomax in anyway. While I understand that he was not perfect and have read much criticism of him and his methods. I often wonder how much blues music we would even care about today if it were not for some of his work. And I also try to understand his work when being viewed in relationship to the differences in race relations over time.

As for the plight of the African American, please believe me when I tell you I fully understand it. I was born and raised in the state of Louisiana and I have seen and experienced racism up close and personally. I did not come to blues music because one of my college buddies had just heard Led Zeppelin doing a cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson song (not that there is any thing wrong with loving the blues for that reason). Everyday when I went to school I passed two Juke Joints, the real deal, the kind that the chain "The House Of Blues" is modeled after. I grew up in a neighborhood where old men played blues music on their front porches just to entertain themselves. And while I have learned a lot from reading books on the blues and doing research, nothing informs my appreciation of blues music like my upbringing.

I'd like to address the tone of your comment. While I think it is important to get the truth out there about blues music, and to honor those who came before us, that is why I started this series of post, I also think it does not serve the music well to take an us against them attitude. Blues music does not belong to any one group, race, creed, color or geographic region. That is the beauty of blues music. It is a very simple art form, you can teach a child to play blues music, but it may take that child's whole life to master it. We all know that there were many bad things done to blues musicians over the years, I welcome revelations and more research into the history of the blues. But I think we also have to move forward and create a new blues that values people and promotes the beauty of the music and not just the bad things.

And finally let me stress how much I enjoy getting the perspective of others here at SML. I have a couple of contributors who I believe are knowledgeable and who bring their own views and history of blues music. I have several regular commenters who comment, question and as a general rule help us keep our facts straight. I welcome you and your knowledge and would love it if you became a regular commenter.