Well-dressed enough to be a Bible salesman in Alabama, I thought, but missing the mark of a successful academic. He was big, though I suppose not as big as he looked, in an ill-fitting blue suit, with his collar and tie askew. I knew it was Lomax despite never having seen a picture of him, because his slightly genteel Texas accent drifted to the back of the room. As the audience fi led out, I saw Lomax talking with two men who I later learned were Colin Turnbull and Weston La Barre, not your everyday anthropologists. The big event that night was a concert of African music by the Nigerian drummer Olatunji, who had added to his group some of the members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and the mixture of the two musics had the scholars puzzled. I was a graduate student new to the world of folklorists and ethnomusicologists and eager to connect with them somehow.

The founders of the discipline were all there?Charles Seeger, Mantle Hood, Alan Merriam?but the doors were still wide open. They were still debating the defi nition of music, the meaning of dance, the function of song, all with a sense of wonder and urgency. The first time I saw Alan Lomax was at a meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, an academic group then too new to have developed its own orthodoxies. Szwed tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz, 'Everything about him radiated confidence and security in what he was doing.'Įxcerpt: 'Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded The World'Īlan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World ' in Angola prison and they ran into one guy who was singer par excellence,' says John Szwed, professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University and the author of the new biography, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. He traveled everywhere from Mississippi to Japan searching for folk music, collecting thousands of songs and recording musicians such as Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, Vera Hall and Leadbelly, whom he met in a prison.

From 1933 until he stopped working in 2002, two years before his death, Lomax devoted his life to preserving the folk songs of the past. Alan Lomax wanted to create a record of world sound.

Alan lomax recordings