Alan Lomax Selected Writings 1934 –1997

With Introductory Essays by Gage Averill, Matthew Barton, Ronald D. Cohen, Ed Kahn, and Andrew Kaye Alan Lomax, one of the great figures in American music, is indelibly linked to the folk music he worked tirelessly to preserve. As a collector, promoter, and champion of the real arts of the people, Lomax's remarkable career stretched over more than sixty years. During his first field trip in 1934, he and his father dis-covered the legendary singer Lead Belly in a Louisiana prison farm. Over the coming years, he was among the first to recognize the enor-mous talents of Woody Guthrie, oversee Jelly Roll Morton's last jazz recordings, and compile the first great archive of world music on record. Lomax worked at the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song during the 1930s and 1 940s. After the 1950s, years he spent in Europe recording music of all kinds, Lomax turned his attention to academic folklore, developing important theories of the relation of music and dance around the world. Lomax believed passionately in the value of authentic American and world folk music, decades before these styles were recognized as art forms or even worth preserving. In recent years, the rich legacy of his recordings has been reissued on CD through Rounder Records, bringing an entire new audience to the music and showing how visionary he was in pursuing music around the globe. In addition to making hundreds of record-ings and dozens of films, Lomax was a prolific writer, noted for his famed folksong collections American Ballads and Folk Songs and Our Singing Country (both coauthored with his father John), his oral history Mister Jelly Roll,  and the memoir The Land Where the Blues Began, winer of the 1993 National Book Critics For None Fiction. Yet Lomax's both popular and academic, have never been collected.