Song Hunter: The Life of Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax stands as the greatest collector of American folk and blues songs of all time. For around 70 years he worked tirelessly to gather oral history and preserve songs that might never have been recorded. Together with his father John, he is credited with contributing thousands of songs to the Library Of Congress Archive of American Folksong.

Lomax is revered as a pioneering folklorist and ethnomusicologist for his documentation of the birth of the blues and the “discovery” of the likes of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and Mississippi Fred Mcdowell. Yet he has also been criticized as a morally questionable character, who romanticized Black culture and manipulated copyright ownership of the material he collected, for personal gain.

Alan Lomax was born in Austin Texas in 1915, he spent a year at Harvard before joining the University of Texas, where he graduated with a philosophy degree. Aged 18, he took to the road with his father, John A. Lomax, to collect American folk music for the first time. Their trip took place during the Great Depression, a period when the foundations of American identity were in turmoil.

In 1933, armed with a 500-pound portable recording machine, they set out to discover isolated communities and retrieve their traditions of song for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folksong. One of the first people they came across was Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter.

Lead Belly was “discovered” by Alan and his father at Angola State Prison, Louisiana, where he was serving time for murder. His vast repertoire of songs and his mastery of the 12-string guitar astonished the Lomaxes, who saw him as a living time capsule of old-time music. Lead Belly was released early in 1934 on good behavior (though the Lomaxes claimed he sang for his freedom).

Following Lead Belly’s release, John Lomax hired him as a personal servant and driver, managing his career at the same time. Despite a spate of publicity, performances, and recordings their relationship quickly soured. Lead Belly claimed that he was financially exploited and treated with the condescension typical of the Jim Crow South.

Alan, who had a different take on race relations, continued to work with Lead Belly. He helped him land a recording contract with RCA-Victor and conducted interviews with him for the Library of Congress. Unlike his father, Alan claimed to see folk music as a potential catalyst for democratic ideals that could promote equality for all. The promotion of Lead Belly and his music marked the beginning of a mission to record the culture of working people that transcended the color line of segregation.

Alan Lomax’s mission to record America’s folk musicians, especially in the South, aimed at the preservation of what he saw as the rapidly vanishing music heritage of rural America. The Land Where The Blues Began (1995), offers nostalgic reflections on his field trips in the South and the challenges he faced as a white collector of Black songs.

His field recordings introduced iconic bluesmen such as Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and Mississippi Fred McDowell to the world. Through his work at the Library of Congress (1937-1942), he became an early pioneer of oral history following his interviews with Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Jelly Roll Morton.

The vast archive of music he amassed remains a cornerstone of American cultural identity, yet aspects of this legacy remain controversial. His critics have described him as arrogant and self-serving, on the basis that he listed himself as a co-composer on his recordings to gain royalties. The charge is that he often placed his own interests over the interests of the musicians he recorded.

Furthermore, his methods and attitudes have sparked significant debate. He is said to have traveled around the South disguised in Blackface and once boasted that his father “was a f*king genius at getting blacks to sing” —  before excitedly describing the dangers of recording in the Jim Crow South.

His contradictions aside, as a song hunter in the American South, Lomax’s pursuit of authentic folk culture led to the recording of multiple legendary artists and the promotion and preservation of some of America’s best-loved musical traditions.

His belief that folk songs were to be found in “dammed up” self-contained communities—remote plantations, cowboy ranches, and southern segregated prisons—cut off from popular culture, shaped this legacy.

After being listed on the infamous anti-communist FBI blacklist, Red Channels, on September 24, 1950, amid the intensifying Red Scare, Alan Lomax boarded the SS Mauretania and headed for England. He wrote in his diary that he was setting off to become “a comrade of the world.”

Using London as his base, Lomax conducted extensive field recordings across the British Isles, Italy, and Spain between 1950 and 1958. In Britain, he worked alongside Peter Kennedy of the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme. Together, they recorded traditional singers such as Harry Cox of Gt. Yarmouth, folk revival singers like Ewan MacColl and A.L Lloyd, Welsh miners in Treorchy, and the ballad singers of The Ship Inn pub, Blaxhall, Suffolk.

In 1952, he wrote that “the vigor and charm of these living English folk songs may surprise most listeners, perhaps most of all the British.” He recorded ballads, Gaelic songs, and contemporary folk music all over Scotland. Between 1951 and 1953, supported by the Irish Folklore Commission and the BBC, he recorded a wide range of Irish traditional singers, storytellers, and fiddle players in both English and Irish.

In Spain, from 1952 to 1953, Lomax captured folk music hailing from all over the country, from Asturias in the north and Andalucia in the south to the islands of Ibiza and Mallorca. For the first time, he took over 700 photographs to document his observations. Similarly, during a six-month field trip across Italy, accompanied by Italian ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella, he took over 1,300 photographs of local life to accompany their recordings.

In 1958, Lomax returned to the United States. Throughout his life he continued to travel extensively, making pioneering recordings in the Caribbean (Cuba, Dominica, and Puerto Rico), as well as France, Romania, and Morocco.

Lomax’s approach to folk cultures mirrored the view of culture popularized by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and imported into the study of folk song by James Francis Child (1825-1896), an American folklorist and scholar. The crux of Child’s work was the belief that folk ballads originated from a period untainted by modern class relations and captured the “true” essence of the people.

Lomax, like Child before him, took Herder’s distinction between the learned culture (“Kultur der Gelehrten”) of civilization and the people’s culture (“Kultur des Volkes”) of isolated peasant communities to be highly instructive. Folk music was the music of the common people, untouched by the corrupting influences of commercial society.

He was critical of the alienating dimensions of modern society — cultural imperialism and unchecked capitalism. Against the “standardization” of everyday life, he saw the resilience of folk cultures as a wellspring of resistance. Consequently, in American Ballads and Folksongs (1934), he stated the purpose of his work: “[to] find the Negro who had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man.” The result was that songs were collected on remote plantations, in lumber yards, and in segregated prisons, while Black churches, colleges, and schools were ignored.

Lomax’s drive to preserve what he saw as the “authentic” aspects of Black folk music was in many ways progressive. He spoke passionately about protecting and celebrating folk cultures’ unique, grounded characteristics. He believed that the Black folk music of the South offered a “pure” alternative to the decadence and disaffection of mass culture.

Above all, he believed folk music was a vibrant grassroots force that could become a collective “voice of the people.” Yet, in his quest for authenticity, he failed to see Black southern culture as a dynamic phenomenon — akin to his own. Instead, he viewed the struggle “against the centralized control of culture as an issue of center vs. periphery” (Baron, 2012).

Legendary folk artists, from Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan have argued that Alan Lomax deserves the lion’s share of credit for the folk song revivals of the 1950s and 1960s.

His work inspired artists from Lonnie Donovan and The Beatles, to Nick Drake. Alan Lomax helped shape the way that the Western world understands and relates to its musical heritage.

In addition to his seminal work in the United States, Lomax spent seven years living in London and using it as a base to hunt for songs in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the Balkans. His recordings captured a wide range of musical styles, and through his popular programs on radio and television, he brought folk music and culture to a bigger audience than ever before.

Yet, according to his critics, he too often viewed folk culture as a static object to be preserved and he romanticized the isolation and struggle of the communities he documented. His was an essentialist understanding of “folk” culture, marked by an emphasis on difference, and blindness to the dynamics between local culture and wider society.

Curiously, despite his fame as a song hunter, archivist, broadcaster, and writer, the major preoccupation of Alan Lomax’s later life was his controversial “Cantometrics” project. Drawing on the Italian word for song “canto” and “metrics,” indicating measurement, Cantometrics represented his attempt to quantify and analyze the characteristics of world music.

His belief that different singing styles and song metrics could be codified, statistically analyzed, and then correlated with broader patterns of human behavior and social organization was met with mixed reactions. At best Cantometrics has been described as limited, and at worst dangerously ethnocentric and flat-out pseudo-scientific.

All together, Alan Lomax was a man of great contradictions. Yet his influence on popular music was colossal. Though his methods and motivations remain subjects of fierce debate, his belief that the essence of national culture lies in the localized cultures of everyday people remains an inspiring vision of collective national heritage and identity in turbulent times.