11/19/2022 0 Comments John and alan lomax![]() ![]() “That’s why they were singing for us … I saw what I had to do. “They felt they had communicated their problem to the big world,” he wrote. Making his first field trip with his father through their native Texas in 1933, 18-year-old Alan was galvanized by the passion of the people he was recording. ![]() The psychological roots of Lomax’s driven personality merit more analysis than they receive here, but it’s hard to argue with Szwed’s decision to focus on the crucial role he played in preserving and championing traditional music and the communities that produced it. Two marriages and multiple affairs are mentioned mostly in passing, as is his conflicted relationship with his father, John, a noted collector of cowboy ballads who introduced Alan to folklore but disliked the political conclusions his son drew from it. The author has little interest in Lomax’s personal life. (Szwed’s previous biographies of two other American originals, Miles Davis and Sun Ra, took a similar approach.) A professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University who knew Lomax in his later years, Szwed does not aim to critically evaluate his subject’s sometimes cloudy ideas but rather to present them sympathetically. Grand statements like that were common currency for Lomax, who moved through the world “with an absolute assuredness of who he was and where he was,” in the assessment of biographer John Szwed. Folklore was not a dusty academic discipline, he insisted, but “one of the great well springs of the democratic attitudes that have in the past two centuries begun to make for a more equitable life for all mankind.” ![]() Yet even as he accumulated statistics and countless reels of tape for high-level, cross-cultural comparisons, Lomax held fast to his vision of folk music as a window into the experiences of the poor and dispossessed. Beginning his career as a folklorist in the 1930s with field recordings of African American music in the rural South, he aspired by the 1960s to nothing less than the analysis and classification of folk songs from around the world. Alan Lomax was a titanic figure whose ambitions were even greater than his formidable energies. ![]()
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