"We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency."

--Alan Lomax, 1915-2002

[Lomax, 1941]

Although he might not have recognized it himself, Alan Lomax, who died July 19th at the age of 87, was the original godfather of punk. From the time he dropped out of Harvard in 1933 to join his father, musicologist John Lomax, on a field recording expedition for the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax was a formidable crusader for the kind of D.I.Y. musical ethic that put him directly in the musical lineage of almost every significant thread of popular music that you can imagine. If you imagine that your listening habits are uninfluenced by his work, you simply haven't been paying attention.

A couple of cases in point - during that seminal trip in 1933, the Lomaxes encountered an inmate of Louisiana's infamous Angola Penitentiary, whose musical plea for release they recorded and delivered to the Governor. Huddie Leadbetter was released, and the recordings Alan Lomax made of the man best known as Leadbelly went around the world and inspired a young Brit named Lonnie Donegan, whose music, dubbed "skiffle," inspired a generation of his countrymen to pick up guitars and do it themselves. Among those who responded to Donegan's recording of "Rock Island Line" were a pair of Liverpool pals who ultimately inspired almost everyone else in the pop field for the last 40 years.

[Leadbelly]

While he was introducing Leadbelly to a wider audience, Lomax stumbled across a young Oklahoman who was on the bill of a benefit for the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War. Lomax, who by then was the host of a program on the CBS radio network, arranged for the first broadcast of Woody Guthrie, which was one of the keys to convincing the Dust Bowl balladeer that there might be a living of sorts to be squeezed out of his songs. His efforts were instrumental in the musical development of a young Minnesotan, and the music of Bob Dylan is a touchstone in the lineage of the entire folk rock/alt.country/ Americana/singer-songwriter strain of popular music.

His role in introducing Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie would be enough to cement his spot in musical history, but Lomax also had a role in recording, producing, promoting and/or otherwise popularizing artists including Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, Josh White, Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson and countless others. In addition, he compiled significant field collections of the music of the Caribbean, the British Isles and the European continent, culminating in an 18 volume collection of world folk songs for Columbia records that could be considered the origin of today's World Music movement. It was his general knowledge of the world's music that led to Carl Sagan tapping him as the musical consultant for the Voyager Space Probe, which carried Lomax's selections to the stars.

[Woody Guthrie]

On a personal level, I remember Lomax as the editor of the 1960 volume "Folk Songs Of North America," which was the source of about 80% of my initial guitar repertoire. Woody's songs were there, and Leadbelly's, and songs whose origins were long lost in the mists of time, but whose existence was maintained through the efforts of a remarkable man who thought that every voice lifted in song was worth hearing, and that every song composed from the heart was worth singing.

In recent years, his attention was devoted to his World Juke Box project, which earned him a MacArthur "genius" grant, and which included the reissue of many volumes of his field recordings on Rounder Records. In 1986 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in a White House ceremony presided over by President Ronald Reagan, an ironic event in the life of a man whose European sojourn in the fifties was largely inspired by his desire to avoid a McCarthy era investigation of his "premature anti-Fascism."

[Lomax, 2000, with daughter]

Musical obituaries are never the happiest assignments, especially when so many involve lives cut short by various elements of tragedy and/or stupidity. None of those elements are present in this circumstance. Though failing health curtailed his activities in his very last years, Alan Lomax had almost seven decades of productive activity in pursuit of his life's mission in his 87 years, and the evidence of his success is present in almost every song you've ever heard. While mourning his loss, remember to celebrate his life. Pick a record - most any record - and sing along.

(C) 2002 - Shaun Dale