The term Lomax may refer to: In places:

• Lomax, Illinois, a village
• Lomax, La Porte, Texas, a neighborhood
• Lomax Magnet Elementary School, in Tampa, Florida

People with the surname Lomax:

• Lomax (surname)

Other:

• Lomax (band), a British rock band
• LO-MAX Records, a record label
• Lomax (auto), a Citroën 2CV-based kit car, styled like a 3-wheel Morgan
• Lomax, a character in A. Conan Doyle's "Adventure of the Illustrious Client."
• Lomax Company, a Serbian cosmetics company established in 2001, unifying two companies Lora and Max-ex.
• Lomax, the Hound of Music, a children's television show on PBS.
• Lomax distribution, used in Business modeling

See also[link]

• The Adventures of Lomax, a video game made by Psygnosis
• Lomas (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Alan Lomax
Lomax playing guitar on stage at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina, in the early 1940s.
Background information
Born	(1915-01-31)January 31, 1915[1] Austin, Texas, United States[2]ref name=nyt-obit/>
Died	July 19, 2002(2002-07-19) (aged 87)[2] Safety Harbor, Florida, United States[2]
Occupations	Folklorist, ethnomusicologist, musician

Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. During the New Deal, with his father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.

After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture. With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore,^[3] even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, The Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 80s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Lomax, born in Austin in 1915, was third of the four children of pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax, with whom he started his career by recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The elder Lomax, a former professor of English at Texas A&M and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the University of Texas. When Alan was 10, the family moved to Dallas, where John Lomax took a job selling bonds in a bank.

Because of childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, Lomax had mostly been home schooled in elementary school. In Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys (a tiny prep school), where he excelled. He attended the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut for a year, graduating eighth in his class at age 15 in 1930.^[4] Because of his mother's declining health, however, rather than going to Harvard, as father wished, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. A roommate, future anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, recalled Lomax as "frighteningly smart, probably classifiable as a genius", though Goldschmidt remembers Lomax exploding one night while studying: "Damn it! The hardest thing I've had to learn is that I'm not a genius."^[5] At the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper, The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control.^[6] At this time he also he began collecting "race" records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs, at the risk of expulsion. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess, age 10, was sent to live with an aunt. Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his sophomore year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and the Pre-Socratics with University of Texas professor Albert P. Brogan.^[7] He also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects.^[8] Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for the Library of Congress, co-authoring American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). He did his first field collecting without his father with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935, finishing his BA in Philosophy at the University of Texas the following year. He would later pursue graduate studies with Melville J. Herskovits at Columbia University and with Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold in February 1937. They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anne (later known as Anna). Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over the BBC Home Service as part of the war effort. During the fifties, after she and Lomax divorced, she conducted lengthy interviews for Lomax with folk music personalities, including Vera Ward Hall and the Reverend Gary Davis. Lomax also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1935); with John Wesley Work III and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts^[9] and Jean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in the Caribbean (1961); with Shirley Collins in Britain and the American South (1959); with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter. All those who assisted and worked with him were accurately credited on the resultant Library of Congress and other recordings, as well as in his many books, films, and publications.

Assistant in Charge and Commercial Records and Radio Broadcasts[link]

From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings.

A pioneering oral historian, he also recorded substantial interviews with many legendary folk and jazz musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz pioneers, and Big Bill Broonzy. He also initiated some of the first (if not the very first) "man-on-the street" radio interviews of ordinary citizens. On December 8, 1941, as "Assistant in Charge at the Library of Congress, he sent telegrams to fieldworkers in ten different localities across the United States, asking them to collect reactions of ordinary Americans to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by the United States. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President," was recorded in January and February 1942.^[10]

In late 1939, Lomax hosted a series on CBS's nationally broadcast American School of the Air, called American Folk Songs and Wellsprings of Music, a music appreciation course that aired daily in the schools and was supposed to highlight links between American folk and classical orchestral music. As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet. The individual programs reached ten million students in 200,000 U.S. classrooms and was also broadcast in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, but both Lomax and his father felt that the concept of the show, which portrayed folk music as mere raw material for orchestral music, was deeply flawed and failed to do justice to vernacular culture.

In 1940 under Lomax's supervision, RCA made two groundbreaking suites of commercial folk music recordings: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly's Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs.^[11] Though they did not sell especially well when released, Lomax's biographer, John Szwed calls these "some of the first concept albums."^[12]

In 1940, Lomax and his close friend Nicholas Ray went on to write and produce a fifteen-minute program, Back Where I Come From, which aired three nights a week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically. Its racially integrated cast included Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Josh White, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. In February 1941, Lomax spoke and gave a demonstration of his program along with talks by Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Pan American Union, and the president of the American Museum of Natural History, at a global conference in Mexico of a thousand broadcasters CBS had sponsore to to launch its worldwide programming initiative. Mrs. Roosevelt invited Lomax to Hyde Park.^[13] But despite its success and high visibility, Back Where I Come From never picked up a commercial sponsor. The show ran for only twenty-one weeks before it was suddenly canceled in February, 1941.^[14] On hearing the news Woody Guthrie wrote Lomax from California, "Too honest again, I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it can't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."^[15] Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development.^[16]

While serving in the army in World War II Lomax produced and hosted numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera", The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.

In the late 1940s, he produced a highly regarded series of commercial folk music albums for Decca records and organized a series of concerts at New York's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, featuring blues, calypso, and flamenco music. He also hosted a radio show, Your Ballad Man, in 1949 that was broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Radio Network and featured a highly eclectic program, from gamelan music, to Django Reinhardt, to Klezmer music, to Sidney Bechet and Wild Bill Davison, to jazzy pop songs by Maxine Sullivan and Jo Stafford, to readings of the poetry of Carl Sandburg, to hillbilly music with electric guitars, to Finnish brass bands – to name a few.^[17]

Move to Europe and later life[link]

In December 1949 a newspaper printed a story "Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers'", that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. The article mentioned Alan Lomax as one of the sponsors of the dinner, along with C. B. Baldwin, campaign manager for Henry A. Wallace; New York Times music critic Olin Downes; and W.E.B. DuBois, all of whom it accused of being members of Communist front groups.^[18] The following June Red Channels, a pamphlet edited by former F.B.I agents which became the basis for entertainment industry blacklist of the 1950s, listed Lomax as an artist or broadcast journalist sympathetic to Communism (others listed included Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein Yip Harburg, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Burl Ives, Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, and Josh White). That summer, congress was debating the McCarran Act, which would require the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies",^[19] while the House Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings. Feeling sure that the Act would pass and realizing that his career in broadcasting was in jeopardy, Lomax, who was newly divorced and already had an agreement with Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records to record in Europe,^[20] hastened to renew his passport, cancel his speaking engagements, and plan for his departure, telling his agent he hoped to return in January "if things cleared up". He set sail on September 24, 1950, on board the steamer RMS Mauretania. Sure enough, in October, FBI agents were interviewing Lomax's friends and acquaintances. Lomax never told his family exactly why he went to Europe, only that he was developing a library of world folk music for Columbia. Nor would he ever allow anyone to say he was forced to leave. In a letter to the editor of a British newspaper, Lomax took a writer to task for describing him as a "victim of witch-hunting", insisting that he was in the UK only to work on his Columbia Project.^[21]

Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly-invented LP records. He spent seven months in Spain, where in addition to recording three thousand items from most of the regions of Spain, he made copious notes and took hundreds of photos of "not only singers and musicians but anything that interesed him – empty streets, old buildings, and country roads", bringing to these photos, "a concern for form and composition that went beyond the ethnographic to the artistic".^[22] He drew a parallel between photography and field recording:

Recording folk songs works like a candid cameraman. I hold the mike, use my hand for shading volume. It's a big problem in Spain because there is so much emotional excitement, noise all around. Empathy is most important in field work. It's necessary to put your hand on the artist while he sings. They have to react to you. Even if they're mad at you, it's better than nothing.^[23]

When Columbia Records producer George Avakian gave jazz aranger Gil Evans a copy of the Spanish World Library LP, Miles Davis and Evans were "struck by the beauty of pieces such as the 'Saeta', recorded in Seville, and a panpiper's tune ('Alborada de Vigo') from Galicia, and worked them into the 1960 album, Sketches of Spain."^[24]

For the Scottish, English, and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy, Scots poet Hamish Henderson, and with Séamus Ennis,^[25] recording among others, Margaret Barry and the songs in Irish of Elizabeth Cronin; Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson; and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, and interviewing some of these performers at length about their lives. Lomax also hosted a folk music show on BBC's home service and organized a skiffle group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who included Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Shirley Collins, among others), which appeared on British television. His ballad opera, Big Rock Candy Mountain, premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot. In Scotland, Lomax is credited with being an inspiration for the School of Scottish Studies, founded in 1951, the year of his first visit there.^[26][27]

Lomax and Diego Carpitella's survey of Italian folk music for the Columbia World Library, conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, helped capture a snapshot of a multitude of important traditional folk styles shortly before they disappeared. The pair amassed one of the most representative folk song collections of any culture. From Lomax's Spanish and Italian recordings emerged one of the first theories explaining the types of folk singing that predominate in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom.

Return to the United States[link]

Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, Folksong '59, in Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood; the Selah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs (a rock and roll group). The occasion marked the first time rock and roll and bluegrass were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs", Lomax told the audience. According to Izzy Young, the audience booed when he told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll. In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music . . . . At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing."^[28]

Alan Lomax had met 20-year-old English folk singer Shirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained a contract from Atlantic Records to re-record some of the American musicians first recorded in the 1940s, using improved equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle, Hobart Smith, Wade Ward, Charlie Higgins and Bessie Jones and culminated in the discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell. Recordings from this trip were issued under the title Sounds of the South and some were also featured in the Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. Lomax wished to marry Collins but when the recording trip was over, she returned to England and married Austin John Marshall. In an interview in The Guardian newspaper, Collins expressed irritation that Alan Lomax's 1993 account of the journey, The Land Where The Blues Began, barely mentioned her. "All it said was, 'Shirley Collins was along for the trip'. It made me hopping mad. I wasn't just 'along for the trip'. I was part of the recording process, I made notes, I drafted contracts, I was involved in every part".^[29] Collins addressed the perceived omission in her memoir, America Over the Water, published in 2004.^[30]

Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961. They separated the following year and were divorced in 1967.^[31]

In 1962, Lomax and singer and Civil Rights Activist Guy Carawan, music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album, Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961-62, on Vanguard Records for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth. Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; a Sicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska [1]; in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more.

Cultural Equity[link]

"The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice."—Alan Lomax, 1972^[32]

As a member of the Popular Front and People's Songs in the 1940s, Alan Lomax promoted what was then known as "One World" and today is called multiculturalism.^[33] In the late forties he produced a series of concerts at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall that presented flamenco guitar and calypso, along with country blues, Appalachian music, Andean music, and jazz. His radio shows of the '40s and '50s explored musics of all the world's peoples.

Lomax recognized that folklore (like all forms of creativity) occurs at the local and not the national level and flourishes not in isolation but in fruitful interplay with other cultures. He was dismayed that mass communications appeared to be crushing local cultural expressions and languages. In 1950 he echoed anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), who believed the role of the ethnologist should be that of advocate for primitive man (as indigenous people were then called), when he urged folklorists to similarly advocate for the folk. Some, such as Richard Dorson, objected that scholars shouldn't act as cultural arbiters, but Lomax believed it would be unethical to stand idly by as the magnificent variety of the world's cultures and languages was "grayed out" by centralized commercial entertainment and educational systems. Although he acknowledged potential problems with intervention, he urged that folklorists with their special training actively assist communities in safeguarding and revitalizing their own local traditions.

Similar ideas had been put into practice by Benjamin Botkin, Harold W. Thompson, and Louis C. Jones, who believed that folklore studied by folklorists should be returned to its home communities to enable it to thrive anew. They have been realized in the annual (since 1967) Smithsonian Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (for which Lomax served as a consultant), in national and regional initiatives by public folklorists and local activists in helping communities gain recognition for their oral traditions and lifeways both in their home communities and in the world at large; and in the National Heritage Awards, concerts, and fellowships given by the NEA and various State governments to master folk and traditional artists.^[34]

In 1983, Lomax founded The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE). It is housed at the Fine Arts Campus of Hunter College in New York City and is the custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive. The Association's mission is to "facilitate cultural equity" and practice "cultural feedback" and "preserve, publish, repatriate and freely disseminate" its collections.^[35] Though Alan Lomax's appeals to anthropology conferences and repeated letters to UNESCO fell on deaf ears, the modern world seems to have caught up to his vision. In an article first published in the 2009 Louisiana Folklore Miscellany, Barry Jean Ancelet, folklorist and chair of the Modern Languages Department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, wrote:

Every time [Lomax] called me over a span of about ten years, he never failed to ask if we were teaching Cajun French in the schools yet. His notions about the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity have been affirmed by many contemporary scholars, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann who concluded his recent book, The Quark and the Jaguar, with a discussion of these very same issues, insisting on the importance of "cultural DNA" (1994: 338-343). His cautions about "universal popular culture" (1994: 342) sound remarkably like Alan's warning in his "Appeal for Cultural Equity" that the "cultural grey-out" must be checked or there would soon be "no place worth visiting and no place worth staying" (1972). Compare Gell-Mann:

Just as it is crazy to squander in a few decades much of the rich biological diversity that has evolved over billions of years, so is it equally crazy to permit the disappearance of much of human cultural diversity, which has evolved in a somewhat analogous way over many tens of thousands of years… The erosion of local cultural patterns around the world is not, however, entirely or even principally the result of contactwith the universalizing effect of scientific enlightenment. Popular culture is in most cases far more effective at erasing distinctions between one place or society and another. Blue jeans, fast food, rock music, and American television serials have been sweeping the world for years. (1994: 338-343)

and Lomax:

carcasses of dead or dying cultures on the human landscape, that we have learned to dismiss this pollution of the human environment as inevitable, and even sensible, since it is wrongly assumed that the weak and unfit among musics and cultures are eliminated in this way… Not only is such a doctrine anti-human; it is very bad science. It is false Darwinism applied to culture – especially to its expressive systems, such as music language, and art. Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels… With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it livable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need. The only way to halt this degradation of man's culture is to commit ourselves to the principles of political, social, and economic justice. (2003 [1972]: 286)^[36]

In 2001, in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, UNESCO's Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity declared the safeguarding of languages and intangible culture on a par with protection of individual human rights and as essential for human survival as biodiversity is for nature,^[37] ideas remarkably similar to those forcefully articulated by Alan Lomax many years before.

FBI investigations[link]

From 1942 to 1979 Lomax was repeatedly investigated and interviewed by the FBI, although nothing incriminating was ever discovered and the investigation was eventually abandoned. Scholar and jazz pianist Ted Gioia uncovered and published extracts from Alan Lomax's 800-page FBI files.^[38] The investigation appears to have started when an anonymous informant reported overhearing Lomax's father telling guests in 1941 about what he considered his son's Communist sympathies. Looking for leads, the FBI seized on the fact that, as a teenager in the 1930s, Lomax had transferred from Harvard to the University of Texas after being arrested in Boston in connection with a political demonstration. In 1942 the FBI sent agents to interview students at Harvard's freshman dorm about Lomax's participation in a demonstration that had occurred at Harvard in 1932 in support of the immigration rights of one Edith Berkman, a Jewish woman, dubbed the "red flame" for her labor organizing activities among the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and threatened with deportation as an alleged "Communist agitator".^[39] Lomax had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined $25.00. Miss Berkman, however, had been cleared of all accusations against her and was not deported. Nor had Lomax's Harvard academic record been affected in any way by his activities in her defense. Nevertheless, the bureau continued trying vainly to show that in 1932 Lomax had either distributed Communist literature or made public speeches in support of the Communist Party.

According to Ted Gioia:

Lomax must have felt it necessary to address the suspicions. He gave a sworn statement to an FBI agent on April 3, 1942, denying both of these charges. He also explained his arrest while at Harvard as the result of police overreaction. He was, he claimed, 15 at the time – he was actually 17 and a college student – and he said he had intended to participate in a peaceful demonstration. Lomax said he and his colleagues agreed to stop their protest when police asked them to, but that he was grabbed by a couple of policemen as he was walking away. "That is pretty much the story there, except that it distressed my father very, very much", Lomax told the FBI. "'I had to defend my righteous position, and he couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand him. It has made a lot of unhappiness for the two of us because he loved Harvard and wanted me to be a great success there.' Lomax transferred to the University of Texas the following year".^[38]

Lomax left Harvard in 1932 after spending his sophomore year there, because his father lost his job and all his money during the depression and could no longer afford to pay his tuition, and not for any political or academic reasons. He probably also had wanted to be near his newly bereaved father, now a widower, the close friends he had made during his freshman year at the University of Texas, and his young sister, Bess.

In June 1942 the FBI approached the Librarian of Congress, Archibald McLeish, in an attempt to have Lomax fired as Assistant in Charge of the Library's Archive of American Folk Song. At the time, Lomax was preparing for a field trip to the Mississippi Delta on behalf of the Library, where he would make landmark recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, among others. McLeish wrote to Hoover defending Lomax: "I have studied the findings of these reports very carefully. I do not find positive evidence that Mr. Lomax has been engaged in subversive activities and I am therefore taking no disciplinary action toward him." Nevertheless, according to Gioia:

Yet what the probe failed to find in terms of prosecutable evidence, it made up for in speculation about his character. An FBI report dated July 23, 1943, describes Lomax as possessing "an erratic, artistic temperament" and a "bohemian attitude." It says: "He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results." The file quotes one informant who said that "Lomax was a very peculiar individual, that he seemed to be very absent-minded and that he paid practically no attention to his personal appearance." This same source adds that he suspected Lomax's peculiarity and poor grooming habits came from associating with the hillbillies who provided him with folk tunes".

Lomax, who was a founding member of People's Songs, was in charge of campaign music for Henry A. Wallace's 1948 Presidential run on the Progressive Party ticket on a platform opposing the arms race and supporting civil rights for Jews and African Americans. Subsequently, Lomax was one of the performers listed in the publication Red Channels as a possible Communist sympathizer and was consequently blacklisted from working in US entertainment industries.

A 2007 BBC news article revealed that in the early '50s, the British MI5 placed Alan Lomax under surveillance as a suspected Communist. Its report concluded that although Lomax undoubtedly held "left wing" views, there was no evidence he was a Communist. Released September 4, 2007 (File ref KV 2/2701), a summary of his MI5 file reads as follows:

Noted American folk music archivist and collector Alan Lomax first attracted the attention of the Security Service when it was noted that he had made contact with the Romanian press attaché in London while he was working on a series of folk music broadcasts for the BBC in 1952. Correspondence ensued with the American authorities as to Lomax' suspected membership of the Communist Party, though no positive proof is found on this file. The Service took the view that Lomax' work compiling his collections of world folk music gave him a legitimate reason to contact the attaché, and that while his views (as demonstrated by his choice of songs and singers) were undoubtedly left wing, there was no need for any specific action against him.

The file contains a partial record of Lomax' movements, contacts and activities while in Britain, and includes for example a police report of the "Songs of the Iron Road" concert at St Pancras in December 1953. His association with [blacklisted American] film director Joseph Losey is also mentioned (serial 30a).^[40]

The FBI again investigated Lomax in 1956 and sent a 68-page report to the CIA and the Attorney General's office. However, William Tompkins, assistant attorney general, wrote to Hoover that the investigation had failed to disclose sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution or the suspension of Lomax's passport.

Then, as late as 1979, an FBI report suggested that Lomax had recently impersonated an FBI agent. The report appears to have been based on mistaken identity. The person who reported the incident to the FBI said that the man in question was around 43, about 5 feet 9 inches and 190 pounds. The FBI file notes that Lomax stood 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, weighed 240 pounds and was 64 at the time:

Lomax resisted the FBI's attempts to interview him about the impersonation charges, but he finally met with agents at his home in November 1979. He denied that he’d been involved in the matter but did note that he’d been in New Hampshire in July 1979, visiting a film editor about a documentary. The FBI's report concluded that "Lomax made no secret of the fact that he disliked the FBI and disliked being interviewed by the FBI. Lomax was extremely nervous throughout the interview".^[38]

The FBI investigation was concluded the following year, shortly after Lomax's 65th birthday.

Awards[link]

Alan Lomax received the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan in 1986; a Library of Congress Living Legend Award^[41] in 2000; and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from Tulane University in 2001. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1993 for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, connecting the story of the origins of blues music with the prevalence of forced labor in the pre-World War II South (especially on the Mississippi levees). Lomax also received a posthumous Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in 2003. Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax (Rounder Records, 8 CDs boxed set) won in two categories at the 48th annual Grammy Awards ceremony held on Feb 8, 2006^[42] Alan Lomax In Haiti: Recordings For The Library Of Congress, 1936–1937, issued by Harte Records and made with the support and major funding from Kimberley Green and the Green foundation, and featuring 10 CDs of recorded music and film footage (shot by Elizabeth Lomax, then nineteen), a bound book of Lomax's selected letters and field journals, and notes by musicologist Gage Averill, was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2011.^[43]

World music and digital legacy[link]

Brian Eno wrote of Lomax's later recording career in his notes to accompany an anthology of Lomax's world recordings:

[He later] turned his intelligent attentions to music from many other parts of the world, securing for them a dignity and status they had not previously been accorded. The "World Music" phenomenon arose partly from those efforts, as did his great book, Folk Song Style and Culture. I believe this is one of the most important books ever written about music, in my all time top ten. It is one of the very rare attempts to put cultural criticism onto a serious, comprehensible, and rational footing by someone who had the experience and breadth of vision to be able to do it."^[44]

In January 2012, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that they would release Lomax's vast archive in digital form. Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project he called the Global Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs.^[45] By February 2012, 17,000 music tracks from his archived collection were expected to be made available for free streaming, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.^[1] As of March, 2012 this has been accomplished. Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online.^[46][47] This is material from Alan Lomax’s independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by the Association for Cultural Equity. This is "distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection — which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax’s prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center" ^[46] at the library of Congress.

On August 24, 1997 at a concert at Wolf Trap, Vienna, Virginia, Bob Dylan had this to say about Lomax, who who had helped introduce him to folk music and whom he had known as a young man in Greenwich Village :

There is a distinguished gentlemen here who came … I want to introduce him – named Alan Lomax. I don’t know if many of you have heard of him [ Audience applause. ] Yes, he’s here, he’s made a trip out to see me. I used to know him years ago. I learned a lot there and Alan … Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we’ve got anybody to thank, it’s Alan. Thanks, Alan.”^[48]

Footnotes[link]

Bibliography[link]

A partial list of books by Alan Lomax includes:

• L'Anno piu' felice della mia vita (The Happiest Year of My Life), a book of ethnographic photos by Alan Lomax from his 1954-55 fieldwork in Italy, edited by Goffredo Plastino, preface by Martin Scorsese. Milano: Il Saggiatore, M2008.
• Alan Lomax: Mirades Miradas Glances. Photos by Alan Lomax, ed. by Antoni Pizà (Barcelona: Lunwerg / Fundacio Sa Nostra, 2006) ISBN 84-9785-271-0
• Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997. Ronald D. Cohen, Editor (includes a chapter defining all the categories of cantometrics). New York: Routledge: 2003.
• Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean Compiler, with J. D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawes. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997 (Cloth, ISBN 0-679-40453-8); New York: Random House, 1998 (Cloth).
• The Land Where The Blues Began. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
• Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music: Audiocassettes and a Handbook. Berkeley: University of California Media Extension Center, 1976.
• Folk Song Style and Culture. With contributions by Conrad Arensberg, Edwin E. Erickson, Victor Grauer, Norman Berkowitz, Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay, Joan Halifax, Barbara Ayres, Norman N. Markel, Roswell Rudd, Monika Vizedom, Fred Peng, Roger Wescott, David Brown. Washington, D.C.: Colonial Press Inc, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Publication no. 88, 1968.
• Penguin Book of American Folk Songs (1968)
• 3000 Years of Black Poetry. Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul, Editors. New York: Dodd Mead Company, 1969. Paperback edition, Fawcett Publications, 1971.
• The Leadbelly Songbook. Moses Asch and Alan Lomax, Editors. Musical transcriptions by Jerry Silverman. Forward by Moses Asch. New York: Oak Publications, 1962.
• Folk Songs of North America. Melodies and guitar chords transcribed by Peggy Seeger. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
• The Rainbow Sign. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1959.
• Leadbelly: A Collection of World Famous Songs by Huddie Ledbetter. Edited with John A. Lomax. Hally Wood, Music Editor. Special note on Leadbelly's 12-string guitar by Pete Seeger. New York: Folkways Music Publishers Company, 1959.
• Harriet and Her Harmonium: An American adventure with thirteen folk songs from the Lomax collection. Illustrated by Pearl Binder. Music arranged by Robert Gill. London: Faber and Faber, 1955.
• Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz". Drawings by David Stone Martin. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1950.
• Folk Song: USA. With John A. Lomax. Piano accompaniment by Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, c.1947. Republished as Best Loved American Folk Songs, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947 (Cloth).
• Freedom Songs of the United Nations. With Svatava Jakobson. Washington, D.C.: Office of War Information, 1943.
• Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. With John A. Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: MacMillan, 1941.
• Check-list of Recorded Songs in the English Language in the Archive of American Folk Song in July 1940. Washington, D.C.: Music Division, Library of Congress, 1942. Three volumes.
• American Folksong and Folklore: A Regional Bibliography. With Sidney Robertson Cowell. New York, Progressive Education Association, 1942. Reprint, Temecula, California: Reprint Services Corp., 1988 (62 pp. ISBN 0-7812-0767-3).
• Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly. With John A. Lomax. New York: Macmillan, 1936.
• American ballads and folk songs. With John Avery Lomax. Macmillan, 1934.

Further reading[link]

• Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World . John Szwed., New York: Viking Press, 2010 (438 pp.: ISBN 978-0-670-02199-4) / London : William Heinemann, 2010 (438 pp.;ISBN 978-0-434-01232-9).

See also:

• Books by John A. and Alan Lomax
• Articles by Alan Lomax
• Alan Lomax Discography
• Alan Lomax Filmography
• Alan Lomax Radio Programs

DVDs[link]

• Lomax the Songhunter, documentary directed by Rogier Kappers, 2004 (issued on DVD 2007).
• American Patchwork television series, 1990 (five DVDs).
• Oss Oss Wee Oss 1951 (on a DVD with other films related to the Padstow May Day).
• Rhythms of Earth. Four films (Dance & Human History, Step Style, Palm Play, and The Longest Trail) made by Lomax (1974–1984) about his Choreometric cross-cultural analysis of dance and movement style. Two-and-a-half hours, plus one-and-a-half hours of interviews and 177 pages of text.
• The Land Where The Blues Began, expanded, thirtieth-anniversary edition of the 1979 documentary by Alan Lomax and ethnomusicologist and civil rights activist Worth Long, with 3.5 hours of additional music and video.

See also[link]

• John Lomax
• Cantometrics

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alan Lomax

• Alan Lomax Collection, The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
• Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) - Alan Lomax pages
• "Remembrances of Alan Lomax, 2002" by Guy Carawan
• "Alan Lomax: Citizen Activist", by Ronald D. Cohen
• Archived version of "Remembering Alan Lomax" by Bruce Jackson
• Interview of Shirley Collins reminiscing about Alan Lomax on Perfect Sound Forever.
• Alan Lomax films for viewing online - Appalachian Journey, Cajun Country, Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old, Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now, The Land Where the Blues Began.
• Lomax: the Songhunter from P.O.V. August 22, 2006. Discussion guide, streaming radio sampler, discussion board.
• Scene taken from Lomax the songhunter, a musical documentary that travels the world (chiefly Spain) to meet people whom Lomax recorded, and portrays his life through interviews with relatives.
• To Hear Your Banjo Play (1947), documentary film written by Alan Lomax, narrated by Pete Seeger, with Texas Gladden, Woody Guthrie, Baldwin Hawes, Cisco Houston, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, and the Margot Mayo Square Dancers (The American Square Dance Group) on Google video
• Oss Oss Wee Oss by Alan Lomax and Peter Kennedy, a filmed documentary of the Padstow May Day Ceremony (1951) at Documentary Educational Resources.
• Adam Fisher, "Blues Travelers", T Magazine, New York Times, May 17, 2012. Article about families of Otha Turner, exponent of African influenced Colonial-style fife-and-drum playing, whom Alan Lomax recorded in 1942, 1959, and 1978, in Gravel Springs, northern Mississippi, and regarded as one of his greatest discoveries. Turner made his first CD at the age of 90, see Bill Ellis, "Fife Master, Rural Blues Legend Otha Turner dies; Was 94", Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), February 27, 2003. Turner's music was featured in Martin Scorsese's film The Gangs of New York.

John Lomax
Lomax visiting with Alabama musician Uncle Rich Brown in 1940
Background information
Birth name	John Avery Lomax
Born	(1867-09-23)September 23, 1867
Origin	Goodman, Mississippi, U.S.A.
Died	January 26, 1948(1948-01-26) (aged 80)
Occupations	Folklorist, musicologist

John Avery Lomax (September 23, 1867 - January 26, 1948) was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk songs. He was father to Alan Lomax, also a distinguished collector of folk music.

Early life[link]

The Lomax family originally came from England in the 18th century when William Lomax settled in a colony in North Carolina. John Lomax was born in Goodman, Mississippi to James Avery Lomax and Susan Frances Cooper.^[1] In December 1869, the Lomax family traveled by ox cart from Mississippi to Texas. John Lomax grew up in central Texas, just north of Meridian in rural Bosque County.^[2] His father raised horses and cattle and grew cotton and corn on the 183 acres (0.74 km²) of bottomland he had purchased near the Bosque River.^[3] The cowboy songs he was exposed to during his childhood influenced him in such a way that his future choice of career already seemed confirmed.^[4] About 1876, the nine-year-old Lomax met and became close friends with Nat Blythe, a former slave who had just been hired as a farmhand by James Lomax. The friendship, "which perhaps gave my life its bent," lasted three years, and was crucial to Lomax's early development.^[5] Lomax, whose own schooling was sporadic because of the heavy farmwork he was forced to do, taught Blythe to read and write, and Blythe taught Lomax songs like "Big Yam Potatoes on a Sandy Land" and dance steps like "Juba." When Blyth was twenty-one, he took his savings and left. Lomax never saw him again and heard rumors that he had been murdered. For years afterward, he always looked for Nat when he traveled around the South.^[6]

When he was about to turn twenty-one, and his legal obligation to work as apprentice on his father's farm was coming to an end, his father permitted him to take the profits from the crops of one of their fields. Lomax used this, along with the money from selling his favorite pony, to pay to further his education. In the fall of 1887, he attended Granbury College in Granbury^[7] and in May 1888, he graduated and eventually became a teacher. He began his first job as a teacher at a country school in Clifton, southeast of Meridian.^[8] As time went on, he grew tired of the low pay and country-school drudgery and he applied for work at Weatherford College in the spring of 1889. He was hired as principal by the school's new president, David Switzer, who previously had been president of Granbury College until it was closed down and he was transferred to Weatherford.^[9] In 1890, after having attended a summer course at Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lomax returned to Texas where he became head of the Business Department of Weatherford College.^[10] Each summer, between 1891 and 1894, he also attended the annual lecture-and-concert series at New York State's Chautauqua Institute, which pioneered adult education (and where Lomax himself would later lecture).^[11] According to Porterfield, "There he improved his mathematics, struggled with Latin, listened to music that stirred him (opera and oratorios, light 'classics' of the day), and learned, for the first time, of two poets—Tennyson and Browning—whose work would soon become an integral part of his intellectual equipment."^[12]

Early career[link]

By this time, however, his desire for further education made him dream of a degree at a first-rate university, and his first choice was Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But he soon realized that he probably would not pass Vanderbilt's tough entrance examinations.^[13] In 1895, at the age of 28, Lomax entered the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in English literature, and undertaking almost a double course load (including Greek, Latin and Anglo Saxon) and was graduated in two years. With a touch of Texas hyperbole, he later wrote:

Never was there such a hopeless hodge-pogde, There was I, a Chautauqua-educated country boy who couldn't conjugate an English verb or decline a pronoun, attempting to master three other languages at the same time . . . . But I plunged on through the year, for since I was older than the average freshman, I must hurry, hurry, hurry. I don't think I ever stopped to think how foolish it all was.^[14][15]

In his memoir, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, Lomax recounts how he had arrived at the University of Texas with a roll of cowboy songs he had written down in childhood. He showed them to an English professor, Morgan Callaway, only to have them discounted as "cheap and unworthy," prompting Lomax to take the bundle behind the men’s dormitory and burn it. His interest in folksongs thus rebuffed, Lomax focused his attentions on more acceptable academic pursuits.^[16] He joined the fraternity Phi Delta Theta and the Rusk Literary Society, as well as becoming an editor and later the editor-in-chief of the University of Texas Magazine.^[17] During the summer of 1896, he attended a summer school program in Chicago studying languages.^[18] In 1897, he became an associate editor of the Alcalde, a student newspaper.^[19] After graduation in June 1897, he worked at the University of Texas as registrar for the next six years until the spring of 1903.^[20][21] He also had other duties such as being personal secretary to the President of the University, manager of Brackenridge Hall (the men’s dormitory on campus), and serving on the Alumni Scholarship Committee.^[22] Lomax joined a campus fraternity known as The Great and Honorable Order of Gooroos receiving the title "Sybillene Priest".^[23]

Sometime around July 1898 Lomax began an intense relationship with Miss Shirley Green of Palestine, Texas, whom he had met in 1897.^[24][25] Their friendship had its ups and downs for years until June 1902, when Lomax met Bess Baumann Brown from Dallas, one of Green's acquaintances.^[26] It ultimately emerged that the reason for Miss Green's reluctance to commit herself was that she was mortally ill with tuberculosis.^[27] However, he continued to exchange letters with Miss Green until January 1903. She died a month later.^[28] In 1903, he accepted an offer to teach English at Texas A&M University beginning in September^[29] In the meantime, Lomax decided to enroll at the University of Chicago for a summer course.^[30] Upon his return to Texas he became engaged to Miss Bess Brown and they married on June 9, 1904, in Austin.^[31][32] The couple settled down at College Station near the A&M campus.^[33] Their first child, Shirley, was born on August 7, 1905.^[34]

Lomax, however, driven by consciousness of the inadequacy of his early education, still burned with the desire to improve himself, and on September 26, 1906, he jumped at the chance to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a graduate student, having previously received a $500 stipend: The Austin Teaching Fellowships.^[35] Here he had the opportunity to study under Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge, two renowned scholars who actively encouraged his interest in cowboy songs.^[36] Harvard, in fact, was the center of American folklore studies (then viewed as a subsidiary of English literature, itself a novel field of scholarship in comparison with the more traditional study of rhetoric focused on classical languages and geared to preparing lawyers and clergy). Kittredge, in addition to being a well-known scholar of Chaucer and Shakespeare, was the son-in-law of renowned ballad scholar Francis James Child, whose professorship of English literature he inherited, and who continued Child's work in folklore.

It was Kittredge who pioneered modern methods of ballad study, and who encouraged collectors to get out of their armchairs and library halls and to get out into the countryside to collect ballads first hand. When he met John Lomax in 1907, this was what he encouraged him to do; the cowboy songs Lomax had been writing down were glimpses into a whole new world, and Lomax should follow up on his work. "Go and get this material while it can be found," he told the young Texan. "Preserve the words and music. That's your job."^[37]

Both Wendell and Kittredge continued to play an important advisory role in Lomax's career long after he returned to Texas in June 1907, Master of Arts degree in hand, to resume his teaching position at A&M. The two professors even went down to Texas to visit their former pupil, who took them to visit Sunday services in a black church.

Soon after his return to Austin, John Lomax's son, John Jr., was born, on June 14, 1907.^[38][39] Galvanized by Kittredge's advice and support, Lomax had begun collecting cowboy songs and ballads,^[40] but his work was interrupted on February 7, 1908, when "The Great A&M Strike" broke out. The strike, caused by student dissatisfaction with the administration,^[41] continued even after February 14, 1908, when the University, in a conciliatory gesture, fired some of its administrators. Unable to teach because of the strike, Lomax, decided to see about resuming his collecting of cowboy ballads with a view to publishing them in a book. Encouraged by Wendell, he applied for and was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship grant.^[42] In June 1908, Lomax became a full professor at A&M. That August the strike ended when the President of the University resigned.^[43]

In June 1910, Lomax accepted an administrative job at the University of Texas as "Secretary of the University Faculties and Assistant Director of the Department of Extension."^[44] In November 1910, the result of his collecting labors, the anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published by Sturgis and Walton, with an introduction by then-former president Theodore Roosevelt. Among the songs included were "Jesse James", "The Old Chisholm Trail", "Sweet Betsy From Pike", and "The Buffalo Skinners" (which George Lyman Kittredge considered "one of the greatest western ballads" and which was praised for its Homeric quality by Carl Sandburg and Virgil Thomson.)^[45] From the first, John Lomax insisted on the inclusiveness of American culture. Some of the most famous songs in the book — "Git Along Little Dogies", "Sam Bass," and "Home on the Range" — were credited to black cowboy informants.

Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads emerged as a major collection of Western songs and had "a profound effect on other folk song students.".^[46] According to noted folklore scholar, D. K. Wilgus, the book's publication "sparked a great surge of interest in folk songs of all kinds, and in fact, inspired a search for folk material in all regions of the nation." ^[47] Its success transformed John A. Lomax into a nationally known figure.^[48][49][50]

Texas Folklore Society[link]

Around the same time, Lomax and Professor Leonidas Payne of the University of Texas at Austin co-founded the Texas Folklore Society, following Kittredge’s suggestion that Lomax establish a Texas branch of the American Folklore Society. Lomax and Payne hoped that the society would further their own research while kindling an interest in folklore among like-minded Texans. On Thanksgiving Day, 1909, Lomax nominated Payne as president of the society, and Payne nominated Lomax as first secretary. The two set out to marshal support, and a month later, Killis Campbell, an associate professor at the University, publicly proposed the formation of the Society at a meeting of the Texas State Teachers Association in Dallas.^[51] By April 1910, there were ninety-two charter members.^[52]

Lomax then used his prestige as a nationally-known author to travel the country raising money for folklore studies and to establish other state folklore societies. "He was among the first scholars to present papers about American folk songs to the Modern Language Association, the nation's leading organization of teachers of languages and literature. For the next several years he hit the lecture circuit, traveling so often that his wife, Bess Brown, had to help him with his schedules and even some of his speeches."^[46] His lectures on cowboy songs, ballads and poetry took him all across the eastern USA.^[53] For example, in December 1911, Lomax made a successful performance at Cornell University, singing and reciting some of the cowboy songs he had collected.^[54] Sometimes he would have a chorus of college students dress up as cowboys to add interest to his presentations.

Lomax's abiding interest in African-American folklore was also in evidence, for he had plans to publish another book containing black folk songs within a year. Although the book failed to materialize, he did publish (in the Journal of American Folklore, December 1912) "Stories of an African Prince", a collection of sixteen African stories, which he had obtained through his correspondence with a young Nigerian student, Lattevi Ajayi.^[55] In 1912, with the backing of Kittredge, John A. Lomax was elected president of the American Folklore Society, with Kittredge (himself a former president of the society) as First Vice President. He was re-elected for a second term in 1913.^[56] In 1922, J. Frank Dobie became secretary-treasurer of the Texas Folklore Society, a job he was to hold for 21 years.

Lomax's second son (and third child), Alan, was born on January 15, 1915. In time, Alan Lomax would prove a worthy successor of his father. A second daughter, Bess, was born in 1921, and she too had a distinguished career, both as a performer and teacher.

The Texas Folklore Society grew gradually over the next decade, with Lomax steering it forward. At his invitation, Kittredge and Wendell attended its meetings. Other early members were Stith Thompson and J. Frank Dobie, who both began teaching English at the university in 1914. In 1915, at Lomax's recommendation, Stith Thompson became the society’s secretary-treasurer. In 1916, Lomax's voluminous encyclopedia, The Book of Texas, which he had written jointly with Harry Yandall Benedict, was published. The same year, Stith Thompson edited the first volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, which Dobie reissued as Round the Levee in 1935. This publication exemplified the society’s express purpose, and the motivation behind Lomax's own work: to gather a body of folklore before it disappeared, and to preserve it for the analysis of later scholars. These early efforts foreshadowed what would become Lomax’s greatest achievement, the collection of more than ten thousand recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In the inaugural issue of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, John A. Lomax urged the collection of Texas folklore: "Two rich and practically unworked fields in Texas are found in the large Negro and Mexican populations of the state." He adds, "Here are many problems of research that lie close at hand, not buried in musty tomes and incomplete records, but in vital human personalities."^[57]

Throughout the next seven years, he continued his research and lecture tours, assisted and encouraged by his wife and children. All this came to an end on July 16, 1917, however, when Lomax was fired along with six other faculty members as the result of a political battle between Governor James Ferguson and the University President, Dr. R. E. Vinson. Lomax moved to Chicago to take a job selling bonds at Lee, Higginson, a bond brokerage firm run by the son of his old professor Barrett Wendell. A few months later, Ferguson was impeached and the Board of Regents rescinded its dismissal of the faculty, Lomax who felt some loyalty to the family of Barrett Wendell felt it would be wrong to desert his post at the Chicago brokerage so quickly and remained in Chicago for the duration of the war.^[58] He had moved to Chicago to take a job with the brokerage firm of Lee, Higginson and remained there for eighteen months until the war ended. There he struck up a what turned out to be a lifelong friendship with Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, who frequently mentions him in his book, American Songbag (1927). In 1919, his next book, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, an anthology of cowboy poetry, was published by Macmillan. That year Lomax returned to Texas to be secretary of the Texas Exes, which had become financially independent of the University, so as to avoid further interference from politicians. Nevertheless, interference struck, when Ferguson, whom the law prohibited from holding office, ran his wife, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, as his surrogate. As governor, Mrs. Ferguson was able to pack the board of regents and oust John from his job as editor of the Alcade, which during his tenure was a 100-page long publication. Seeing how the wind was blowing, Lomax resigned his secretaryship and joined the Republic Bank of Dallas in 1925. The economic crash of 1929 presaged bad things for the bank, however.

Archive of American Folk Song[link]

Tragedy struck the Lomax family in 1931 when Lomax's beloved wife Bess Brown died at the age of fifty, leaving four children (the youngest, Bess, only ten years old). In addition, the Dallas bank at which Lomax worked failed: he had to phone his customers one by one to announce that their investments were all worthless. In debt and unemployed and with two school-age children to support, the sixty-five year old went into a deep depression. In hope of reviving his father's spirits, his oldest son, John Lomax Jr. encouraged him to begin a new series of lecture tours. They took to the road, camping out by the side of the road to save money, with John Jr. (and later Alan Lomax) serving the senior Lomax as driver and personal assistant. In June 1932, they arrived at the offices of the Macmillan publishing company in New York. Here Lomax proposed his idea for an anthology of American ballads and folksongs, with a special emphasis on the contributions of African Americans. It was accepted. In preparation he traveled to Washington to review the holdings in the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress.

By the time of Lomax’s arrival, the Archive already contained a collection of commercial phonograph recordings that straddled the boundaries between commercial and folk, and wax cylinder field recordings, built up under the leadership of Robert Winslow Gordon, Head of the Archive, and Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division. Gordon had also experimented in the field with a portable disc recorder, but had had neither time nor resources to do significant fieldwork. Lomax found the recorded holdings of the Archive woefully inadequate for his purposes. He therefore made an arrangement with the Library whereby it would provide recording equipment, obtained for it by Lomax through private grants, in exchange for which he would travel the country making field recordings to be deposited in the Archive of the Library, then the major resource for printed and recorded material in the United States

After the departure of Robert Gordon from the Library in 1934, John A. Lomax was named Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song, a title he held until his death in 1948. His work, for which he was paid a salary of one dollar, included fund raising for the Library, and he was expected to support himself entirely through writing books and giving lectures. Lomax secured grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, for continued field recordings. He and Alan recorded Spanish ballads and vaquero songs on the Rio Grande border and spent weeks among French-speaking Cajuns in southern Louisiana.

Thus began a ten-year relationship with the Library of Congress that would involve not only John but the entire Lomax family, including his second wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, Professor of Classics and Dean of Women at the University of Texas, whom he married in 1934. All four of John’s children assisted with his folksong research and with the daily operations of the Archive: Shirley, who performed songs taught to her by her mother; John Jr., who encouraged his father's association with the Library; Alan Lomax who accompanied John on field trips and who from 1937–42 served as the Archive’s first paid (though very nominally) employee as Assistant in Charge; and Bess, who spent her weekends and school vacations copying song texts and doing comparative song research.

Field recordings[link]

Through a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, Lomax was able to set out in June 1933 on the first recording expedition under the Library’s auspices, with Alan Lomax (then eighteen years old) in tow. As now, a disproportionate percentage of African American males were held as prisoners. Robert Winslow Gordon, Lomax's predecessor at the Library of Congress, had written (in an article in the New York Times, c. 1926) that, "Nearly every type of song is to be found in our prisons and penitentiaries"^[59] Folklorists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson also had observed that, "If one wishes to obtain anything like an accurate picture of the workaday Negro he will surely find his best setting in the chain gang, prison, or in the situation of the ever-fleeing fugitive."^[60] But what these folklorists had merely recommended John and Alan Lomax were able to put into practice. In their successful grant application they wrote, following Odum, Johnson and Gordon's hint, that prisoners, "Thrown on their own resources for entertainment . . . still sing, especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio, the distinctive old-time Negro melodies." They toured Texas prison farms recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues from prisoners such as James "Iron Head" Baker, Mose "Clear Rock" Platt, and Lightnin’ Washington. By no means were all of those whom the Lomaxes recorded imprisoned, however: in other communities, they recorded K.C. Gallaway and Henry Truvillion.

In July 1933, they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315 pounds (143 kg) phonograph uncoated-aluminum disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as "Lead Belly," whom they considered one of their most significant finds. During the next year and a half, father and son continued to make disc recordings of musicians throughout the South.

In contrast to earlier amateur collectors, the Lomaxes were also among the first to attempt to apply scholarly methodology in their work, though they did not adhere to the strict empirical positivism adopted by the subsequent generation of academic folklorists, who believed in refraining from drawing conclusions about the data they amassed.^[61]

The following year (in July 1934), they visited Angola once again. This time Lead Belly begged them to make a recording of a song he had written to take to the Governor requesting parole, which they did. However, unbeknownst to them, Lead Belly was released in August for good time (and because of cost-cutting due to the Depression) and not because of the Lomaxes' recording, which the Governor may not have listened to. In September 1934, Lead Belly wrote to Lomax requesting employment, since he needed to have a job in order not to be sent back to prison. At the urging of John, Jr., Lomax engaged Lead Belly as his driver and assistant and the pair traveled the South together collecting folk songs for the next three months. Then, in December 1934, Lead Belly famously performed illustrating John Lomax's scheduled lecture of folk songs at a smoker and sing-along held at the national MLA meeting in Philadelphia. The result was a sensation and the rest is history (see Lead Belly). Their association continued for three more months—until the following March (1935). In January, Lomax, who knew nothing whatever about the recording business, became Lead Belly's manager and, through a friend, cowboy singer Tex Ritter, got Lead Belly a recording contract with the famous A&R man Art Satherly of ARC records. Satherly had publicity photos made of the singer wearing overalls and sitting on sacks of grain, garb and setting that were customary in commercial publicity photos of country singers in those days.^[62] But Lead Belly's recordings, marketed as race music, failed to sell. A filmed re-enactment in early 1935 for The March of Time newsreel ^[63] of Lomax's discovery of Lead Belly in prison, led to the myth that John Lomax made Lead Belly perform in prison stripes (which is inaccurate). He did perform in overalls, however. During Lomax's two-week lecture tour with Lead Belly on the eastern College circuit in March 1934 (pre-scheduled by Lomax before teaming up with Lead Belly), the two men quarreled over money and never spoke to one another again.

John A. Lomax has been accused of paternalism and of tailoring Lead Belly's repertoire and clothing during his brief association with Lead Belly.^[64] "But," writes jazz historian Ted Gioia,

few would deny the instrumental role he played in the transformation of the one-time convict into a commercially successful performer of traditional African American music. The turnabout in his life was rapid and profound: Lead Belly was released from prison on August 1, 1934; his schedule for the last week of December that year included performances for the MLA gathering in Philadelphia, for an afternoon tea in Bryn Mawr, and for an informal gathering of professors from Columbia and NYU. Even by the standards of the entertainment industry . . . this was a remarkable transformation.^[65]

After his three-months as a performer illustrating John A. Lomax's lectures, Lead Belly went on to a fifteen-year career as an independent artist, championed and assisted intermittently (but not managed) by Alan Lomax.

South Carolina 1938[link]

In 1938 John Lomax visited noted writer Ben Robertson in Pickens County, South Carolina and Ben introduced him to the all-day singing festivals of the area which enabled Lomax to preserve the lyrics of many local folksongs.^[66]

The scope of the collection[link]

The Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress contains songs collected in thirty-three states of the Union and certain parts of the West Indies, the Bahamas, and Haiti. As Curator and Assistant in Charge of the Folk Song Collection John and Alan Lomax supervised and worked with many other folklorists, musicologists, and composers, amateur and professional, all over the country, amassing over ten thousand records of vocal and instrumental music on aluminum and acetate discs along with many pages of written documentation.

In his 1942 introduction to the multi-volume "Checklist of Recorded Folk Song in the Library of Congress", Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Library of Congress's Division of Music, wrote:

Many hard-working and expert folklorists cooperated in the accumulation of this material, but in the main the development of the Archive of American Folk Song represents the work of two men, John and Alan Lomax. Starting in 1933, the Lomaxes, father and son, traveled tens of thousands of miles, endured many hardships, exercised great patience and tact to win the confidence and friendship of hundreds of singers in order to bring to the Library of Congress records of the voices of countless interesting people they met on the way. Very much remains to be done to make our Archive truly representative of all the people, but the country owes a debt of gratitude to these two men for the excellent foundation laid for future work in this field.... The Lomaxes received much help in their expeditions from many interested folklorists, some of whom have made important contributions to the Archive as a result of independent expeditions of their own. To these the Library wishes to take this opportunity to express its deep gratitude. They include Gordon Barnes, Mary E. Barnicle, E. C. Beals, Barbara Bell, Paul Brewster, Genevieve Chandler, Richard Chase, Fletcher Collins, Carita D. Corse, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Dr. E. K. Davis, Kay Dealy, Seamus Doyle, Charles Draves, Marjorie Edgar, John Henry Faulk, Richard Fento, Helen Hartness Flanders, Frank Goodwin, Percy Grainger, Herbert Halpert, Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Myra Hull, George Pullen Jackson, Stetson Kennedy, Bess Lomax, Elizabeth Lomax, Ruby Terrill Lomax, Eloise Linscott, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Walter McClintock, Alton Morris, Juan B. Rael, Vance Randolph, Helen Roberts, Domingo Santa Cruz, Charles Seeger, Mrs. Nicol Smith, Robert Sonkin, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Jean Thomas, Charles Todd, Margaret Valliant, Ivan Walton, Irene Whitfield, John Woods, and John W. Work III.

This checklist has been prepared as a result of countless requests . . . Its appearance at this time is indeed appropriate since it is natural for a nation at war to try to evaluate and exploit to the fullest its own cultural heritage. In our folk song may be found some of the profoundedst currents that have run through American history. A mere glance at the titles listed here will be sufficient to show the variety and complexity of the democratic life of our country.

After 1942, field work of collecting folk songs under government auspices was discontinued due to a shortage of acetate needed for the war effort. But the work had aroused the ire and suspicion of Southern conservatives in Congress who were fearful it could be used as a cover for civil and worker rights agitation, and because of congressional opposition it has never been resumed.

Legacy[link]

John A. Lomax’s contribution to the documentation of American folk traditions extended beyond the Library of Congress Music Division through his involvement with two agencies of the Works Progress Administration. In 1936, he was assigned to serve as an advisor on folklore collecting for both the Historical Records Survey and the Federal Writers' Project. Lomax's biographer, Nolan Porterfield, notes that the outlines of the famed WPA State Guides resulting from this work resemble Lomax and Benedict’s earlier Book of Texas.^[67]

As the Federal Writers' Project's first Folklore Editor, Lomax also directed the gathering of ex-slave narratives and devised a questionnaire for project fieldworkers to use.

The WPA project to interview former slaves assumed a form and a scope that bore Lomax's imprint and reflected his experience and zeal as a collector of folklore. His sense of urgency inspired the efforts in several states. And his prestige and personal influence enlisted the support of many project officials, particularly in the deep South, who might otherwise have been unresponsive to requests for materials of this type. One might question the wisdom of selecting Lomax, a white Southerner^[68] to direct a project involving the collection of data from black former slaves. Yet whatever racial preconceptions Lomax may have held do not appear to have had an appreciable effect upon the Slave Narrative Collection. Lomax's instructions to interviewers emphasized the necessity of obtaining a faithful account of the ex-slave's version of his or her experience. "It should be remembered that the Federal Writers' Project is not interested in taking sides on any question. The worker should not censor any materials collected regardless of its nature." Lomax constantly reiterated his insistence that the interviews be recorded verbatim, with no holds barred. In his editorial capacity he closely adhered to this dictum.^[69]

Upon Lomax's departure this work was continued by Benjamin A. Botkin, who succeeded Lomax as the Project's folklore editor in 1938, and at the Library in 1939, resulting in the invaluable compendium of authentic slave narratives: Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).^[70]

John A. Lomax served as president of the Texas Folklore Society for the years 1940–41, and 1941–42.^[71] In 1947 his autobiography Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York: Macmillan) was published and was awarded the Carr P. Collins prize as the best book of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. The book was immediately optioned to be made into a Hollywood movie starring Bing Crosby as Lomax and Josh White as Lead Belly, but the project was never realized.

Lomax died of a stroke in January 1948, aged 80. On June 15 of that year, Lead Belly gave a concert at the University of Texas, performing children's songs such as "Skip to my Lou" and spirituals (performed with his wife Martha) that he had first sung years before for the late collector.^[72]

In 2010, John A. Lomax was inducted into the Western Music Hall of Fame for his contributions to the field of cowboy music.

Following in his grandfather's footsteps, Lomax's grandson John Lomax III is a nationally published United States music journalist, author of Nashville: Music City USA (1986), Red Desert Sky (2001) and co-author of The Country Music Book (1988). He is also an artist manager and has represented Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Rocky Hill, David Schnaufer and The Cactus Brothers. He began representing the Dead Ringer Band in 1996. John Lomax III was also a music writer for Houston's early-'70s underground newspaper, Space City!

John Lomax III's son John Nova Lomax also kept up the family tradition. While serving as the former music editor of the Houston Press, John Nova Lomax won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music journalism for his profile of troubled former country music superstar Doug Supernaw. John Nova Lomax also helped discover rising country troubadour Hayes Carll. Since 2008, John Nova Lomax has been a staff writer at the Houston Press. In 2010, 100 years after his great-grandfather published his first book, John Nova Lomax published his own first book: Houston's Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Bayou City.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Lomax, John A. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York: Collier Books, reissued 1938 (1910).
• Lomax, John A. "Unexplored Treasures of Texas Folk-Lore". Reprinted in Stith Thompson’s Round the Levee. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, [1935] facsimile edition 1975.
• Porterfield, Nolan. Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867–1948, University of Illinois Press, 2001.
• Spivacke, Harold. Library Of Congress Music Division: Checklist of Recorded Songs in the English Language in the Archive of American Folk Song to July, 1940 (3 Volume Set) Library of Congress (Paperback, March 1, 1942) ASIN: B0017HYX4E
• Wade, Stephen. A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings. Rounder Audio CD, 1997. ASIN: B0000002UB. Contains recordings of E. C. Ball, Honeyboy Edwards, Texas Gladden, Vera Hall, Justice Learned Hand, Kelly Pace, W. H. Stepp, Sonny Terry, and many more.
• Wilgus, D. K. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959.
• Wolfe, Charles and Kip Lornell. Life and Legend of Leadbelly. New York: Da Capo, [1992] 1999.
• Zumwalt, Rosemary Levy. American Folklore Scholarship: a Dialogue of Dissent. (Indiana University Press, 1988).

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John A. Lomax

• "Lomax, John Avery" in the Handbook of Texas Online
• The Defenders, 1913–1926: The Association Saves the University from an Educational Infanticide.", The Alcade (January 2010).
• Biography of John A. Lomax at the Library of Congress website
• 1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes, at the Library of Congress
• Notes on the John and Ruby Lomax 1930 Southern States Recording Trip, at the Library of Congress
• Lead Belly and the Lomaxes: Myths and Realities
• Books by John A. and Alan Lomax
• Biography of John A. Lomax from the Western Music Hall of Fame
• Discovering Keepers of Folk Music. Article by Michael Corcoran in Austin Statesman about John A. Lomax and the Gant family of Austin, Texas

This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (December 2007)

John Richard 'Jackie' Lomax (b. 10 May 1944, Wallasey, Cheshire, England) is a British guitarist and singer/songwriter best known for his association with George Harrison and Eric Clapton. He currently lives in Ojai, California, USA with his wife, Annie (previously Norma Richardson),^[1] mother of fashion photographer Terry Richardson.^[2]

History 1962–1970[link]

In early 1962, Jackie Lomax left Dee and the Dynamites to join Merseybeat band The Undertakers. They followed the same route as The Beatles through local venues before setting out for Hamburg, Germany and finally securing a record deal. From that point onwards, they were dogged by ill-luck and lack of success. They signed with Pye Records and released four singles which only managed to place one week on the British charts between them. In 1965 they moved to America to try their luck there.

After two years in America with The Undertakers and a couple of other groups, Jackie Lomax's latest band, The Lomax Alliance, were taken back to Britain in 1967 by Brian Epstein to showcase them at the Saville Theatre in London. He arranged for a single and an album to be recorded and they signed to CBS. Epstein's untimely death ruined the plans for the band. During that period CBS released two Lomax Alliance singles and one solo Jackie Lomax single. More than enough tracks for an album were recorded but it was never released.

After Brian Epstein's death, the Beatles' new record label Apple took over responsibility for Jackie's recording career, with George Harrison becoming heavily involved on the production side. Despite having 75% of the Beatles on the record as well as Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and Nicky Hopkins, success remained elusive. The shambles which was Apple, after the break-up of the Beatles, made matters even worse. During that period Apple released three singles—including the song "Sour Milk Sea", written by George Harrison—and the Is This What You Want? LP. By 1970, the break-up of the Beatles had badly affected Apple Records. Apple artists found themselves under contract to a label who had no interest in them.

History 1970–1977[link]

After leaving Apple, Jackie Lomax joined a band called Heavy Jelly featuring bassist Alex Dmochowski, guitarist John Moorshead and Carlo Little (drums), who released a single on Head Records ("Chewn In"/"Time Out", Head HDS4001, 1969). During that period a Heavy Jelly LP, made up entirely of Jackie Lomax songs, was recorded but issued for promotional purposes only. It was never commercially released.

In 1971 Jackie Lomax returned to America to live and work in Woodstock, New York. He signed to Warner Bros. Records and reunited with members of the Lomax Alliance and The Undertakers. They returned to the recording studio but his efforts continued to fall on deaf ears. During this Warner period two Jackie Lomax albums were: Home Is In My Head and Three.

Disappointed with his lack of success in America, Jackie Lomax returned to Britain at the end of 1973, where he joined Badger, a progressive rock band originally formed by ex-Yes keyboard player Tony Kaye. He proceeded to turn them into the type of R&B/soul band he had used on his solo albums. The band became a vehicle for Jackie's songs and singing but was short-lived. During the period in which Jackie Lomax was a member of Badger, they released only one LP, White Lady, on Epic Records, which was produced by Allen Toussaint.

Jackie Lomax crossed the Atlantic again to resume his solo career and Capitol Records signed him in 1975. He continued playing the R&B/soul which he had perfected during his recording career but which the public stubbornly refused to embrace. Unfortunately he has been without a recording contract since he left them in 1977. During his time at Capitol, he recorded two albums, Livin' for Lovin' and Did You Ever Have That Feeling?, the second of which was released only in the USA.

Living in America 1978–2000[link]

The 1980s were a very quiet time in the musical career of Jackie Lomax. The mid-1980s saw Jackie playing guitar and singing background vocals on demos for various artists produced by longtime friend Patrick Landreville. During this time Jackie briefly played with the short lived "Tea Bags" a group based in Los Angeles composed at various times of Brit musicians Ian Wallace, Kim Gardner, Mick Taylor, Brian Auger, Terry Reid, Peter Banks, Graham Bell, David Mansfield and others. The 1990s saw an increase in activity for Jackie. He spent periods playing with other British artists on the west coast of America and toured as the bass-player with some of the acts that were big when he first chose to play music - The Drifters, The Diamonds, The Coasters. In California, and Ventura County in particular, Jackie played live with a succession of line-ups, including Tom Petty drummer Randall Marsh, Jim Calire, Patrick Landreville, Mitch Kashmar and many other well respected musicians, as he returned to playing guitar, with a heavier emphasis on the blues side of R&B.

In 1990 he was seen in very good company on a compilation album which featured unique singers covering a wide range of songs, and he appeared on albums for other artists, both as a singer and as a guitarist. Recordings, however, were few and far between.

2001–present[link]

In 2001 Jackie Lomax completed the recording of his first solo album since 1977, The Ballad of Liverpool Slim. 2002 saw him continuing to play on the West Coast of America. In autumn of 2003, he made a triumphant return to The Cavern in Liverpool where it all began more than 40 years earlier. He can often be seen helping out at 'The Hub' bar in E. Ojai Avenue. In 2004 Jackie was a special guest for 3 hours on the 'BeatlesandBeyond' Radio Show in Walsall hosted by Pete Dicks. Pete later wrote the sleeve notes for, and organised, the UK release of Jackie's 'Ballad of Liverpool Slim...and Others' CD. Jackie has since returned to Liverpool on several occasions, playing in the 'Liverpool' pub in James St/ on August Bank Holiday Mondays. On 13 April 2012 Jackie Lomax played on the 50th Anniversary of the Hamburg Star-Club in the Kaiserkeller with the Star Club All-Star-Band and members Brian Griffiths (Big Three), Bobby Thompson (Dominoes) and Joe Fagin ( Strangers) and also with The Undertakers from Liverpool.

Recordings[link]

• The Undertakers Unearthed 1963-65
• The Lomax Alliance and CBS Recordings 1966-1967
• Is This What You Want? 1968 #145 US
• Heavy Jelly 1970
• Home Is In My Head 1971 #211 US
• Three 1972 #208 US
• White Lady /Badger 1974
• Livin' For Lovin' 1976
• Did You Ever Have That Feeling? 1977
• True Voices (Various Artists) 1991
• The Ballad of Liverpool Slim 2001 & 2004
• The Ballad of Liverpool Slim...and Others (Angel Air Records)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official site
• Jackie Lomax at artistdirect.com
• [1]

Charles Kuralt (September 10, 1934 – July 4, 1997) was an American journalist. He was most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his "On the Road" segments on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years.

Kuralt's "On the Road" segments were recognized twice with personal Peabody Awards. The first, awarded in 1968, cited those segments as heartwarming and "nostalgic vignettes"; in 1975, the award was for his work as a U.S. "bicentennial historian"; his work "capture[d] the individuality of the people, the dynamic growth inherent in the area, and ...the rich heritage of this great nation."^[1] He shared in a third Peabody awarded to CBS News Sunday Morning.

Early life and career[link]

Kuralt was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a boy he won a children's sports writing contest for a local newspaper by writing about a dog that got loose on the field during a baseball game. Charles’ father, Wallace H. Kuralt. Sr., moved his family to Charlotte in 1945, when he became Director of Public Welfare in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.^[2] Their house ^[3] off Sharon Road, then 10 miles south of the city, was the only structure in the area. During the years he lived in that house, Kuralt became one of the youngest radio announcers in the country. Later, at Charlotte’s Central High School, Kuralt was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”^[4] In 1948, he was named one of four National Voice of Democracy winners at age 14, where he won a $500 scholarship. He later attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he became editor of The Daily Tar Heel and joined St. Anthony Hall. He worked as a reporter for the Charlotte News in his home state, where he wrote "Charles Kuralt's People," a column that won him an Ernie Pyle Award. He moved to CBS as a writer, where he became well known as the host of the Eyewitness to History series. He traveled around the world as a journalist for the network, including stints as CBS's Chief Latin American Correspondent and then as Chief West Coast Correspondent.^[5]

In 1967, Kuralt and a CBS camera crew accompanied Ralph Plaisted in his attempt to reach the North Pole by snowmobile, which resulted in the documentary To the Top of the World and his book of the same name.

"On the Road"[link]

Kuralt was said to have tired of what he considered the excessive rivalry between reporters on the hard news beats:

"I didn't like the competitiveness or the deadline pressure," he told the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, upon his induction to their Hall of Fame. "I was sure that Dick Valeriani of NBC was sneaking around behind my back — and of course, he was! — getting stories that would make me look bad the next day. Even though I covered news for a long time, I was always hoping I could get back to something like my little column on the Charlotte News."^[6]

When he persuaded CBS to let him try out just such an idea for three months, it turned into a quarter-century project. "On the Road" became a regular feature on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1967.^[7] Kuralt hit the road in a motor home (he wore out six before he was through) with a small crew and avoided the interstates in favor of the nation's back roads in search of America's people and their doings. He said, "Interstate highways allow you to drive coast to coast, without seeing anything".^[8]

According to Thomas Steinbeck, the older son of John Steinbeck, the inspiration for "On the Road" was Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (whose title was initially considered as the name of Kuralt's feature). During his career, he won three Peabody awards and ten Emmy awards for journalism. He also won a George Polk Award in 1980 for National Television Reporting.

Retirement and death[link]

At age 60, Kuralt surprised many by retiring from CBS News. At the time, he was the longest tenured on-air personality in the News division. Yet he hinted that his retirement might not be complete — in 1995 he narrated the TLC documentary The Revolutionary War and in early 1997 he signed on to host a syndicated, three-times-a-week, ninety-second broadcast, "An American Moment," presenting what CNN called "slices of Americana." At that time, Kuralt also agreed to host a CBS cable broadcast show, I Remember, designed as a weekly, hourlong review of significant news from the three previous decades.

He was hospitalized in 1997 and died of complications from lupus, aged 62, that year.

One of Kuralt's books was titled North Carolina Is My Home. Kuralt's younger brother Wallace, who died in December 2003, was also well known in his home state, having been the owner of The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill for many years. In addition, a portion of land along the Roanoke, Tar, Neuse, Cape Fear Ecosystem — so named for the rivers which flow into the Albemarle, Currituck, and Pamlico Sounds — has been named for Kuralt, honoring his having given as much time to nature and wildlife as to people in his "On the Road" and Sunday Morning stories.

By request in his will, Kuralt was buried on the UNC grounds in Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.^[9] The University uses a Kuralt speech in its television commercials and displays many of his awards and a re-creation of his office in its Journalism School.

Posthumous controversy[link]

Two years after his death, Kuralt's personal reputation came under scrutiny when a decades-long companionship with a Montana woman named Patricia Shannon was made public. Kuralt apparently had a second, "shadow" family with Shannon while his wife lived in New York City and his daughters from a previous marriage lived on the eastern seaboard. Shannon asserted that the house in Montana had been willed to her, a position upheld by the Montana Supreme Court. According to court testimony, Kuralt had met Shannon while doing a story on "Pat Baker Park" in Reno, Nevada, that Shannon had promoted and volunteered to build in 1968. The park was in a low-income area of Reno that had no parks until Shannon promoted her plan. Kuralt mentions Pat Shannon and the building of the park — but not the affair — in his autobiography.^{[10][11][12][13]}

References[link]

External links[link]

• Charles Kuralt Collection, 1935-1997 in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Ralph Grizzle, Remembering Charles Kuralt. Asheville, North Carolina: Kenilworth Media, 2000. (ISBN 0967909600)
• Charles Kuralt's People. Asheville, North Carolina: Kenilworth Media, 2005. A collection of his award winning Charlotte News columns.
• Booknotes interview with Kuralt on Charles Kuralt's America, December 31, 1995.
• CNN, "Charles Kuralt, CBS's Poet of Small-Town America, Dies at 62", a CNN obituary
• In re Estate of Kuralt, 15 P.3d 931 (2000)
• Find-A-Grave profile for Charles Kuralt