LOMAX, ALAN

Alan James Lomax (January 31, 1915–July 19, 2002), folk song collector, folk music scholar, and one of the founders of modern ethnomusicology, was born in Austin, Texas. He received his early background in folk music from his father, John Avery Lomax, with whom he went on collecting expeditions throughout most of the United States in the early 1930s. Much of their work included the recording and publication of cowboy songs from the American West and songs of prisoners and other subcultural groups in the South. They also helped establish the popularity of Huddie Ledbetter ("Leadbelly"), Jelly Roll Morton, and other ethnic American performers.

In the mid- to late 1930s, the elder and younger Lomax served as curator and associate curator, respectively, of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. That repository, founded in 1928, had been supported entirely by private contributions and consisted of only a few small collections prior to the arrival of the Lomaxes. Under their direction, it began receiving government endowments and was greatly expanded, in no small measure by the hundreds of recordings that they had made on their collecting expeditions. Those recordings remain among the most valuable primary sources for the study of American folk music.

Alan Lomax completed college at the University of Texas in 1936, then returned to Washington and the Library of Congress. Beginning in 1939, he hosted "Wellsprings of America" and "Back Where I Come From," both on CBS Radio.

Lomax served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II. In 1947, he was appointed director of folk music at Decca Records and continued his folk song collecting. During the 1950s, he helped produce several series of folk song recordings on a number of different labels.

While much of Lomax's most valuable work dates from after the Great Depression, both his interests and his personal views underlying his later efforts were forged during the Depression. Beginning in 1959, he set out to elucidate fully American Southern folk music, especially that of marginalized racial and economic groups. His efforts culminated in the eighty-hour, seven-volume Southern Heritage Folk Series that later was re-released as a four-CD set titled Sounds of the South.

Lomax also was one of several investigators who revolutionized ethnomusicology during the 1960s by championing the study of folk and non-western music in ways that did not involve comparisons to European and Euro-American art music. His greatest contribution to musical scholarship was the systematic linking of music to its social context. During the 1960s and early 1970s he developed a means of assessment and classification known as cantometrics. The central thesis of that system is that vocal musical performance practices reflect the characteristics of the culture from which they emerged. Lomax died near Tarpon Springs, Florida, on July 19, 2002.

LOMAX, ALAN

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