Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax,
circa 1940.
Library of Congress,
Prints and
Photographs Division.
Photomechanical print.
Reproduction Number:
LC-USZ62-121915
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Alan Lomax, son of John A. Lomax, was born in Austin, Texas, on January 31, 1915. He was still a teenager when he began making field expeditions with his folksong-collecting father. Together they published
American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Our Singing Country (1941). On his own, Alan published The Folk Songs of North America (1960) and many other books. In 1933, the Lomaxes began a mutually
beneficial ten-year association with the Library of Congress. Alan became the first federally funded staff member of the Library's Archive of American Folk Song (1936), serving as "assistant in charge" from
1937 to 1942. He made collecting expeditions for the Library, produced a seminal series of documentary folk music albums entitled Folk Music of the United States, conducted interviews with performers such
as Jelly Roll Morton, and over the years introduced Washington audiences to an array of folk musicians. In the 1940s, Lomax hosted and produced a series of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio
broadcasts in New York for Columbia's School of the Air, on which he sang and presented performers such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and the Golden Gate Quartet. After leaving the Library of Congress,
Lomax continued his career as an ethnomusicologist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host. He traveled in the United States and abroad making documentary
recordings, began a database of thousands of songs and dances that he called the "Global Jukebox," and founded the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College in New York City. In 1986, he received the
National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1993, he received the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction for his book The Land Where the Blues Began. Lomax retired
in 1996 and died on July 19, 2002, in Sarasota, Florida.
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