Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997
Language: English
Pages: 376
ISBN: 0415938546
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Alan Lomax is a legendary figure in American folk music circles. Although he published many books, hundreds of recordings and dozens of films, his contributions to popular and academic journals have never been collected. This collection of writings, introduced by Lomax's daughter Anna, reintroduces these essential writings. Drawing on the Lomax Archives in New York, this book brings together articles from the 30s onwards. It is divided into four sections, each capturing a distinct period in the development of Lomax's life and career: the original years as a collector and promoter; the period from 1950-58 when Lomax was recording thorughout Europe; the folk music revival years; and finally his work in academia.
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for the conventions of life behind them. Remembering the old songs in their loneliness, throwing up their voices against prairie and forest track, along new rivers, they followed the instincts of their new experience and the old songs were changed so as to belong to their life in the new country. New songs grew up inconspicuously out of the humus of the old, thrusting out in new directions in small, but permanent, fashion. There grew up a whole continent of people with their songs as much a part
with, here are some albums of African and Afro-American music: “Music of Equatorial Africa,” four 10” unbrk., $7.33, Folkways, recorded by André Didier on a mission to French Equatorial Africa. This is the best album of African music I know, aside from the now unavailable Belgian Congo records. A wide range of instruments—the drum, the antelope horn, the zither, the xylophone, the musical bow, and the sansa (a sort of abbreviated piano)—and an even broader range of song styles remind one again
composite pictures of the melodic patterns of a given culture. Yet in my view, this undoubted technological advance cannot provide a broad enough base for a true musical ethnography. Seeger recognizes this (1958:1). A song is a complex human action—music plus speech, relating performers to a larger group in a special situation by means of certain behavior patterns, and giving rise to a common emotional experience. At the risk of going over elementary ground, I ask the reader to consider a series
comfortable and relaxed attitudes, were four or five other Negro boys. When we approached, lugging our little recording Dictaphone, he did not get up, but sent for a fruit box and a battered tub and in such a quiet and courteous fashion made us welcome to sit, that we forgot the usual awkwardness which besets the ballad-hunter. With Billy Williams of New Orleans, too, there had been no such awkwardness. I had told him that I was hunting for old-time Negro songs. He replied: “I knows what you
European singing style in the strange, shrieked chords of Lucania and Calabria (65), and in the case of Sardinia, to which we will presently come. In Italy, as in Spain, history and the social patterns seem to work together. For over two thousand years the South has been dominated by classical (Eastern) culture and exploited by imperialistic governments. The principal invaders, after the Romans, came from Eurasian musical areas—the Byzantine Greeks, the Saracens, the Normans, the Spaniards.
