Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was born in 1915, in Austin, Texas. He began his ethnomusicologist career in the 1930s by assisting his father, John Lomax, in collecting recordings for the Library of Congress. He then began making recordings on his own, capturing the sounds of America: prison songs, African-American folk tunes, blues and cowboy numbers.

By the 1950s, Lomax began traveling to other parts of the world and recorded what he found. In the United Kingdom he captured the traditional music of England, Scotland and Ireland. He also made trips to Spain and Columbia, and inn the 1960s Lomax traveled to the Caribbean to do some recording.

He would observe how music is incorporated into the culture, what it says about that particular society and, in turn, how it compares with other musical cultures of the world. In between trips outside of the U.S., Lomax would continue to capture American folk music, sometimes in collaboration with the likes of Pete Seeger.

On July 20, 2002, Alan Lomax passed away in Safety Harbor, Florida. He was 87. —Courtesy Calabash Music