Alan Lomax

[John M Cox <coxj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
By JON PARELES


Alan Lomax, the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to
record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie,
died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87....


Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally
famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a
career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to
television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk
traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated
what he called "cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal
time on the air and equal time in the classroom."

Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across
Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very
different today.

"What Caruso was to singing, Alan Lomax is to musicology," the oral
historian Studs Terkel said in 1997. "He is a key figure in 20th-century
culture."

In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as "a missionary."

Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had
evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he
argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. "It is the voiceless
people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of
human life and wisdom," he once said. "I've devoted my entire life to an
obsessive collecting together of the evidence."

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/obituaries/20LOMA.html


John Cox
Chapel Hill, NC
This Week in History:
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police, Genoa




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