John Lomax and Alan Lomax collected, published and disseminated folk music and blues during

the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Discuss the importance of this work to modern popular music.
You cannot overstate the importance of John Lomax and Alan Lomax's work to modern popular
music. They, almost single-handedly, preserved huge amounts of American and European folk
music.They travelled all over America (and later the rest of the world) recording folk and blues
music and they recorded over ten thousand songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk
Song at the Library of Congress. They were first to record such artists as Muddy Waters, Leadbelly
and Woody Guthrie. Most of what Americans know about folk and blues comes from their lives
work and they were also responsible, in part, for the folk revivals in Britain and America as well as
the skiffle boom of the early 1960s. Skiffle later had a huge influence on the development of rock
and roll through bands like The Beatles.
In 1910, John Lomax released a book entitled Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.The book
had been in the works for a long time, with Lomax interested in Cowboy music for years. A
professor he studied under at Harvard encouraged him to get out and collect songs first hand and the
book is a result of his labours. The book emerged as a major collection of cowboy and western
songs. The books 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" (D.K. Wilgus). This collection
became the backbone of American folk music. Theodore Roosevelt the former President of the
United States, was very impressed with the result and wrote the preface.
John and Alan Lomax (then eighteen) set out on their first recording expedition in June 1933 after
recieving a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Many folklorists observed that
the best place to get an acurrate picture of the everyday African Americans was in prisons. The
Lomaxs' travelled around Texas recording different songs. That July they acquired a state of the art
phonograph disk recorder and used it to record a man called Huddie Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly)
who was imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for attempted murder. They continued for
the next year and a half to make recordings of musicians in the South.
In 1934, John Lomax was named Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American
Folk Song for which he was paid a sallary of one dollar. To continue with the field recordings he
secured grants and they revisited Angola where Lead Belly was imprisoned and recorded him some
more. They considered him as a very important find and that September he was employed by John
Lomax as a driver and assisstant during another expedition collecting folk songs. During Lomax's
lecture of folk songs in December, Lead Belly performed to help illustrate the lecture. After 3
months of this Lead Belly went on to have a hugely influential fifteen year career, influencing a
wide range of artists from Frank Sinatra and Abba to Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Alan Lomax conducted and recorded substantial interviews with many jazz and folk musicians. He
also hosted two seperate television series, the first of which was a music appreciation course called
American Folk Songs and Wellsprings of Music which was aired in schools across America and, the
second, Back Where I Come From, was a show containing folk songs, sermons, tales, etc. Lomax
presented different performers on these shows as well, including Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Woody
Guthrie, Brownie McGhee and others. He also hosted numerous war time and post war time radio
programs. His shows helped introduce a generation of children and older audiences to American
folk and appearing on his show exposed musicians to a wider audience.
Alan Lomax left the US probably due to the Second Red Scare, a time in which thousands of
Americans (including Lomax, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie) were accused of being communists.
In Britain, Lomax continued hosting and producing radio shows about folk music and so, interest in

American folk music grew hugely. A Glaswegian named Lonnie Donegan took some Lead Belly
songs and, using a guitar style straight out of the American Deep South, created skiffle music.
Skiffle became very popular in Britain in the 1960's and was hugely influential to bands like the
Beatles, who in turn had a massive impact on the development of all popular music after them.
During his time outside of America, Lomax recorded folk music from England in the 1950's, then
moved onto rural Irish and Scottish folk music. After that he recorded the folk music of Spain and
Italy. Lomax recognized that the folk music of all countries was a precious thing that was in danger
of disappearing and did a lot to correct this.
Meanwhile, the late 1950's and early 1960's saw folk music achieve substantial popularity in
America. The folk scene emerged and was centered in Greenwich Village in Manhattan and Lomax
was impressed by a certain Bobby Dylan who was very similar to and, according to Lomax, had
the genius to appreciate his idol Woody Guthrie. Lomax became quite involved in the Newport Folk
Festivals, the first of which was in 1959. By 1965, folk had gotten widespread popularity with the
likes of Phil Ochs and Joan Baez getting lots of mainstream attention. The Newport Folk Festival of
that year is famous for two reasons: the audience (pretentious folk purists) booing Dylans decision
to go electric and Lomax's fight with festival organiser Albert Grossman over Lomax's somewhat
demeaning introduction for Grossman's band.
Many of the artists the Lomax's recorded benefited from the popularity of later popular music which
was influenced by them. For example, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Who and
many others were hugely influenced by early blues especially the recordings the Lomax's made of
the Mississippi Delta blues. These bands were very popular all over the world and they showed the
old bluesmen a high level of respect which gave artists like Son House and Robert Johnson a level
of fame.
Alan Lomax's stature as a musicologist and the respect he was given by his peers in the industry
shows in his involvement with the Voyager Music Project in the 1970's. Basically, the idea was to
send out a sort of 'time capsule' which would provide any other intelligent life with a picture of life
on earth. Part of this project was to include a selection of music. Lomax was asked to assist in the
selection of the music and Lomax's influence on this was substantial due to his encyclopedic
knowledge of world music. For example, he advocated the inclusion of ethic music mostly at the
cost of Classical music.
Quite obviously John and Alan Lomax's work preserving folk and blues music have completely
changed the way popular music has evolved since then. As a direct result of their recording
expeditions (namely Lead Belly), the genre skiffle was created (through Alan Lomax's championing
of folk and blues in Britain) which in turn had a major impact on the development of arguably the
biggest genre in popular music, Rock and Roll. So many major artists cite the Lomax's 'discoveries'
among their biggest influence. The Lomax's love of folk, blues and ethnic music led to the
preservation of so much fantastic music that otherwise would've been lost to history. Bob Dylan
speaking onstage in 1997 about Alan Lomax, who had helped introduce him to folk music and who
he had known while living in Greenwich Village, sums up Lomax's contribution to folk by saying:
Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if weve got anybody to
thank, its Alan. Thanks, Alan.