NYC Author John Szwed Publishes “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World”

The Association for Cultural Equity and Alan Lomax Archive have announced the release of Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (Viking). This long-awaited first biography of Lomax is by noted NYC-based professor, music scholar, and biographer John Szwed. Szwed is a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University.

(l-r)Renowned banjo player Wade Ward and Alan Lomax

Lomax was essentially born into his profession: when his father – the legendary John Lomax, who published America’s first study of cowboy songs and poetry – lost his bank job in the Depression, Alan joined him on the road making field recordings for the Library of Congress. By the early 1940s he had made the first recordings of Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Woody Guthrie, become the Assistant In Charge of the Library’s Archive of American Folk Song, and was producing radio “ballad operas” for the war effort.

In the 1950s Lomax undertook extensive field recording trips throughout the British Isles, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the Southern United States – his documents of endangered and vanishing traditional music sparked the “folk revival” movements in Britain and America. His concert and festival productions of the ’50s and ’60s proudly featured both black and white singers in an effort to establish the depth and diversity of American folk culture as the foundation for a new kind of popular culture.

Throughout his life Lomax was a controversial figure, whose projects, partnerships, and politics earned him surveillance by the FBI, London’s Metropolitan Police, and the Guardia Civil brownshirts of Spanish dictator Franco. Szwed argues that Lomax was “one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”

Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World is populated by a diverse cast of characters, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Zora Neale Hurston, Nicholas Ray (director of Rebel Without a Cause), Lead Belly, Carl Sandburg, Archibald MacLeish, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan. Szwed, a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University, first met Lomax in the 1960s and frequently worked for him. He uses Lomax’s life as a point of entry into the cultural landscape of the twentieth century, examining how competing interests in culture (New England Brahmins, the Communist Party, the labor movement, the entertainment industry, race and social class) forged a new American identity.

Szwed’s biography is the definitive exploration of Lomax and his work, which had a profound influence on American culture.

Also, the Alan Lomax Archives recently inaugurated it’s first independent record label, Global Jukebox, to issue download-only releases from its vast musical holdings. It’s first five releases commemorates the 50th anniversary of Lomax’s storied Southern Journey. In 1959 and 1960, at the height of the American Folk Revival, Lomax launched the first-ever stereo field recording trip through the South to document its still-thriving vernacular musical culture.

He traveled through Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, making over 70 hours of recordings. The trip came to be known as Lomax’s “Southern Journey,” and its music was first issued for the Atlantic and Prestige labels in the early ’60s.

"Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World" is out now on Viking.

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