Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World

by John Szwed Narrated by Scott Sowers

Overview

The remarkable life and times of the man who popularized American folk music and created the science of songFolklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. By the 1940s he was producing concerts that brought white and black performers together, and in the 1950s he set out to record the whole world.Lomax was also a controversial figure. When he worked for the U. S. government he was tracked by the FBI, and when he worked in Britain, MI5 continued the surveillance. In his last years he turned to digital media and developed technology that anticipated today's breakthroughs. Featuring a cast of characters including Eleanor Roosevelt, Leadbelly, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sagan, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan, Szwed's fascinating biography memorably captures Lomax and provides a definitive account of an era as seen through the life of one extraordinary man.

Editorial Reviews

Mark Berman

[Szwed's] biography is rich in detail, thoroughly explaining Lomax's methods of music collection as well as his movement into crafting books, concerts, festivals and radio programs…Lomax helped reconnect American music with its roots in folk traditions, and his story is an important one for anyone with an interest in cultural history. Szwed admirably captures the efforts of a man who seemed determined to honor what came before him.
—The Washington Post

Janet Maslin

…keenly appreciative, enormously detailed…Mr. Szwed is an ideal match for his fretful, protean subject.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In this busy biography, Columbia music professor Szwed (So What: The Life of Miles Davis) recounts Lomax's six decades of field trips seeking out and recording folk music untainted by commercial jazz and pop influences, especially in the American South, where he discovered blues luminaries Muddy Waters and Lead Belly; his radio shows, concerts, lectures, books, and films; and his impecunious bohemian existence with the likes of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Szwed presents Lomax (1915–2002) as a major intellectual force who championed the cultures of impoverished and racially outcast groups against a homogenizing modernity, and developed wildly ambitious sociopsychological "cantometrics" that theorized a Freudian link between a culture's level of sexual repression and the vowel patterns in its songs. Lomax was an indefatigable promoter of music and ideas, but Szwed's breathless, swirling chronicle of his activities can be fatiguing. One also wishes he had probed more deeply into Lomax's problematic notion of a pure, primitive musical culture sprouting organically from the lives of rural people in isolation from urban entertainment elites. (Jan. 3)

Kirkus Reviews

Overdue, hagiographic biography of the folk-song collector.

Szwed (Music and Jazz Studies/Columbia Univ.; Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture, 2005, etc.) piles up mountains of research on the prolific career of folklorist, author, producer, radio host, filmmaker, musician and impresario Lomax (1915–2002). Son of Texas scholar John A. Lomax, he put his father's life on a new track in 1933, when, at teenaged Alan's urging, the pair undertook a Southern recording expedition for the Library of Congress, which climaxed with the discovery of singer-guitarist Lead Belly. The younger Lomax went on to extensively document the music of Haiti, conduct famous sessions with Woody Guthrie and Muddy Waters and rescue jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton from obscurity. As the government scrutinized his leftist affiliations during the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, Lomax left the United States for eight years in European exile, and he recorded a celebrated series of albums on the music of the British Isles, Spain and Italy. Upon his return, he revisited the South in 1959 to cut a storied series of albums for Atlantic Records. Lomax later developed Cantometrics, an ambitious cross-disciplinary system aimed at classifying world folk music. Szwed delineates Lomax's work down to the last detail; even unfulfilled projects are discussed at stultifying length. But the author observes that work uncritically and tartly dismisses others' reservations about his subject's endeavors—e.g., his self-serving managerial dealings with Lead Belly, or the romanticism and inaccuracies of his 1993 book The Land Where the Blues Began. Mystifyingly, Lomax's personal life gets scant consideration. His fraught, oft-competitive relationship with his father received deeper treatment inLast Cavalier, Nolan Porterfield's 1996 biography of John Lomax. The younger Lomax's life with two wives, lover and collaborator Shirley Collins and companion of 23 years Carol Kulig and his apparently chronic philandering are also left unexplored. Lomax emerges as a brilliant, driven and often conflicted man who revolutionized the study of folk music, but in the end the interior sources of his genius remain unplumbed.

Despite its wealth of detail, this is a portrait left half-painted.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169321029
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	12/30/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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