This is also the birth month of Alan Lomax;
Alan Lomax (January 15, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American folklorist and musicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the West Indies, Italy, and Spain.Every time I think of Mr. Lomax, I thank God for him. He is one of the most important men in the world of blues as far as I am concerned.
Alan Lomax @Amazon.com
Alan Lomax @Wikipedia
Alan Lomax @SqueezeMyLemon
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1 comment:
He could have done very little without the help of John W. Work and his two fellow African American assistants from Fisk University Department of Music, a fact that was concealed for over sixty years. This is a fact revealed in the book Lost Delta Found:Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942
According to a review which appeared in Publishers Weekly:
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."
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