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Lomax was one of the major targets of McCarthyism and the "second great Red Scare" of the early 1950's. Fortunately, it did not succede in getting his music education program out of the public school system in Nashville, Tennessee, so fifteen years after the height of the Red Scare and thirty years after he created it, I was one of the beneficiaries of it and know who Woody Guthrie was beyond just being Arlo's dad and still know the tune to "Roll On, Columbia".
http://www.counterpunch.org/marsh0721.html
July 21, 2002
Mr. Big Stuff Alan Lomax: Great White Hunter or Thief, Plagiarist and Bigot?
by Dave Marsh
Seeing Alan Lomax's obituary on the front page of the New York Times irked the hell out of me. Harry Smith syndrome all over again----the Great White "Discoverer" as the axis of cultural genesis. Lomax, wrote Jon Pareles, "advocated what he called 'cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.'"
He did?
In 1993, when Lomax published The Land Where the Blues Began, his memoir of blues research in the deep South, Peter Bochan invited him to do a WBAI interview. Bochan ventured to Lomax that Elvis Presley stood as a great product of the Southern folk cultures. Lomax firmly denied this, and said that Bochan couldn't even know that Presley had listened as a boy to Sister Rosetta Tharpe's gospel radio show because "You weren't there." He said this so persistently and adamantly -- with all the stupid "folklorist" purism that ruined the folk music revival--that Bochan went home and intercut Lomax's prissy voice and dumb assertions with excerpts from Beavis and Butthead. It aired that way...
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.105.152.153 ( talk) 19:32, 28 October 2008 (UTC)A way in which Elvis differs absolutely from all the other white singers who preceded him is that he never stops moving for an instant. Here he’s like the black singer. … It’s a high level of energy and dynamics that he’s always giving you. . . . Here he really captures the excitement of the Southern railroad engine pounding through the night, the whiz of the automobile, the rumble of the factory, and the tremendous dynamism of American productive life. I could understand why he was so much attacked. He really made the first white bridge across, in behavioral terms, between the whites and the blacks of the South. – in fact, between whites and blacks in America. Before him, everybody had stood and peered at blacks. Elvis joined them as best he could and took enormous delight in projecting emotion in the way they did, as close as he could do it. --Alan Lomax and Forrestine Paulay unpublished transcription from The Urban Strain study quoted in “Alan Lomax and the Big Story of Song” liner notes by Gideon D’Arcangelo to The Alan Lomax Popular Song Book, Rounder CD82161-1863-2 (2003).
- "Though Popular Front musical theory is often described as "nationalist" because of its interest in folk traditions, all of the major Popular Front music theorists -- Finkelstein, Elie Siegmeister, Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger -- rejected national and racial myths of musical purity in favor of what Finkelstein called 'the basic truth that beauty is a product of labor.'" --Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, NY: Verso, 1997), p. 460.
How can we wrap our arms around Alan Lomax? He was a force of nature who appeared superhuman. I thought of Alan as a Minotaur — half man, half supernatural — who defied life as we know it. His very walk seemed untouched by gravity as he slid gracefully with his distinctive gait. Sally Yerkovich recalls seeing Alan one day at the National Endowment for the Arts as he and his sister Bess Lomax Hawes walked side by side down the hall. Each held reading glasses in their extended right hand. They moved with that familiar Lomax stride that covered great distances and led them both to people and places that we celebrate today. --William Ferris, former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Pete Seeger recalls that Alan “had a lot of youth and energy and the experience of working as his father’s assistant for a number of years. I think within five years he did more than most other archives had done in fifty years. He was a whirlwind of energy, and with no budget to speak of.”--ibid
According to every source I've seen, including the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Alan Lomax was born in Austin TX on January 15th not January 31st as the article says. I haven't made the edit yet in case someone actually has an authoritative source for the Jan 31st date. Dick Gaughan ( talk) 14:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
The following interview appeared in the Washington [D.C] City Paper on May 4, 2010 http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/music/2010/05/04/tomorrow-john-szwed-discusses-folklorist-alan-lomax-the-man-who-recorded-the-world/:
WCP: In a July 2002 piece for counterpunch.org, author Dave Marsh attacked Lomax as a prissy, stereotypical folklorist who stole a copyright credit from Leadbelly, failed to pay Muddy Waters, plagiarized and failed to credit John Work of Fisk University, and gained more attention for himself than for the talented musicians he recorded. Do you address these allegations in the book? Did you talk to author Robert Gordon regarding his research that he did for his Muddy Waters bio, and/or look at that work as it relates to Lomax?
JS: Yes, I take up all the Lomax stories, most of which I believe to be wrong. Why they’re wrong is not terribly interesting, but I was obliged to deal with it to get to what I think was the valuable and even exciting parts of his life and work. Let’s just say that Dave Marsh, who has done so much valuable and fine reporting, drove off a cliff with his obituary of Lomax. Talk about kicking a man when he’s down!
I never spoke to Gordon, but I did exchange e-mails with his co-author Bruce Nemerov… I tell a much simpler and less villain-laden story than they do, based on what I believe is more information.
WCP: Because of the passage of time was it hard to do interviews because people have passed away, and documents and tapes and records may no longer be available?
JS: Those are not really problems… There are still a lot of people alive—Pete Seeger, for instance, and many others not so well known.. . And Lomax used the best equipment to record and film, and nearly everything has survived. In fact, a lot of his films and recordings are just coming out now for the first time. The problem, as with everything in life, is sorting out who has first-hand knowledge and who is guessing or passing on stories uncritically. Mballen ( talk) 20:20, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
planned for late Feb. -- Javaweb ( talk) 03:58, 31 January 2012 (UTC)Javaweb
The list of Lomax's collaborators on Cantometrics was inexplicably shortened from: nt "Victor Grauer, Conrad Arensberg, Forrestine Paulay, and Roswell Rudd" to Victor Grauer and Roswell Rudd. Grauer and Rudd worked with Lomax only on the very beginning and end of the project, respectively. The others were more important and (arguably) more eminent, especially in the case of Arensberg. Paulay and Arensberg worked on Cantometrics with Lomax for over twenty years. It is misleading to omit their names. Mballen ( talk) 22:41, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
An editor blanked out this paragraph on the grounds that unless backed by a RS it represented a synthesis to connect Alan Lomax with the United nations:
In 2001, in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, UNESCO's Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity declared the safeguarding of languages and intangible culture on a par with protection of individual human rights and as essential for human survival as biodiversity is for nature, [1] ideas first articulated by Alan Lomax.
In 2006 there was a conference, The Lomax Legacy: Folklore in a Globalizing Century, at the Library of Congress at which one of the attendees was Preston D. Hardison who served since 1995 on the UN Committee for cultural and biological diversity. I don't know this would count as a RS, but I would like to assure the doubting editor and wikipedia readers that it is true that while many anthropologists and biologists shared these concerns Lomax articulated them concerns before the committee was formed. Perhaps another editor will help out. Mballen ( talk) 20:59, 29 April 2012 (UTC) Mballen ( talk) 21:11, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
The ideological basis for these projects [WPA and Library of Congress folksong collecting and archiving] was first expressed in legislative programs enacted to provide economic recovery and relief from the Great Depression of the 1930s, otherwise known as New Deal legislation. The Lomaxes’ work for the Library included work jointly sponsored by the WPA Music Projects, WPA Writers Projects, and the WPA Joint Committee on Folklore, all created by New Deal legislation. Subsequently, the cultural documentation work of the New Deal agencies was recast by Alan Lomax as a call for “cultural equity.” Lomax’s somewhat loosely defined notion of democracy for all local and ethnic cultures led him to argue for their right to be represented equally in the media, the schools, and in national cultural institutions ..... The Director of the [Library of Congress's] American Folklife Center, Dr. Peggy Bulger, serves as a delegate to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Inter-Governmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore. Her participation, as well as representation by the American Folklore Society and other governmental arts and culture organizations from the U.S., has resulted in considerable progress in understanding these critical issues. The broader issue of protection of all “indigenous knowledge” has recently been stated by the United Nations as a tenet of human rights protection."
Every time [Lomax] called me over a span of about ten years, he never failed to ask if we were teaching Cajun French in the schools yet. His notions about the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity have been affirmed by many contemporary scholars, including Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann who concluded his recent book, The Quark and the Jaguar, with a discussion of these very same issues, insisting on the importance of "cultural DNA" (1994: 338-343). His cautions about "universal popular culture" (1994: 342) sound remarkably like Alan's warning in his "Appeal for Cultural Equity" that the "cultural grey-out" must be checked or there would soon be "no place worth visiting and no place worth staying" (1972). Compare Gell-Mann:
Just as it is crazy to squander in a few decades much of the rich biological diversity that has evolved over billions of years, so is it equally crazy to permit the disappearance of much of human cultural diversity, which has evolved in a somewhat analogous way over many tens of thousands of years… The erosion of local cultural patterns around the world is not, however, entirely or even principally the result of contactwith the universalizing effect of scientific enlightenment. Popular culture is in most cases far more effective at erasing distinctions between one place or society and another. Blue jeans, fast food, rock music, and American television serials have been sweeping the world for years. (1994: 338-343)
and Lomax:
carcasses of dead or dying cultures on the human landscape, that we have learned to dismiss this pollution of the human environment as inevitable, and even sensible, since it is wrongly assumed that the weak and unfit among musics and cultures are eliminated in this way… Not only is such a doctrine anti-human; it is very bad science. It is false Darwinism applied to culture – especially to its expressive systems, such as music language, and art. Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels…
With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it livable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need. The only way to halt this degradation of man's culture is to commit ourselves to the principles of political, social, and economic justice. (2003 [1972]: 286)
Mballen ( talk) 03:31, 30 April 2012 (UTC) Mballen ( talk) 03:42, 30 April 2012 (UTC)We have become in this way the champions of the ordinary people of the world who aren't backed up by printing presses, radio chains, and B29's. We believe in the oral tradition, we believe in the small cultural situation, we think that some of these folk of the world have something worthwhile culturally, morally, etc… Now I propose that we should be two-way bridges and form a two-way intercommunication system. We, who speak for the folk in the market place here, have obligations to the people who we represent. (2003 [1950]: 115-116)
I think that you are on the right track overall. I think that the one passage that got reverted was a superficial error (overreach) that you made. (large mention of current event, quick unsupported implied assignment of credit to Lomax by the editor) So I wouldn't read too much into that one reversion. I think you are on the right track and should continue to just keep adding material without being too cautious. North8000 ( talk) 12:02, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
See User_talk:Sean.hoyland#Universal_Declaration_of_Cultural_Diversity. I hope it helps. Sean.hoyland - talk 12:09, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
The article is a little misleading in suggesting that Lomax spent the last 45 years of his life on a project he called the Global Jukebox. This is a mistake made by the NY Times, I believe. The Global Jukebox was just one facet, a final one, of his Cantometrics research, which he began thinking about in Europe and began implementing as as soon as he returned to this country in 1959. However, a more or adequate wikipedia entry on Cantometrics does exist. Mballen ( talk) 00:37, 30 April 2012 (UTC) Mballen ( talk) 14:23, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
The first paragraph is not really a summary of what is in the article or of Lomax's multifarious accomplishments. For example, the list of contributors to Cantometrics is inaccurate. Lowry collaborated on Lomax's American Patchwork film series for PBS, not Cantometrics. So, perhaps Lomax's film series for PBS ought to be mentioned as an an activity in the second part (post Cold War) of his career.
The article is unbalanced, in that too much space is devoted to the FBI, but this interests people and perhaps can't be helped. Mballen ( talk) 16:37, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I want to bring my recent edit to your attention: the past source doesn't even mention Lomax's date of birth. My source is this one. -- Pequod76 ( talk-ita.esp.eng) 00:15, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
[[User talk:Gizgalasi#Concerns - possible hoax editor]] North8000 (
talk) 01:50, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
This is a strange comment - that I am a "hoax editor" - whatever that means. I have made hundreds of suggestions and additions and corrections to Wikipedia. And the comment here is to Lomax's credit. The full statement was made by Carl Sagan and quoted in the book that I referenced in the Wikipedia article about Voyager - Murmurs of Earth. The full statement reads: [it was Lomax] who was a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music. He brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections, because Azerbaijanis play bagpipe-sounding instruments [balaban] and Peruvians play panpipes and such exquisite pieces had been recorded by ethnomusicologists known to Lomax."
I see no reason why the inclusion of Azerbaijan mugham reference on the Voyager records cannot be included. The Murmurs Book includes the entire list of 27 musical samples if you wish. And all this to Lomax's credit because of his emphasis on Cultural Equity ~~Gizgalasi~~
>After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting
Was this because of WWII? And if so, could someone add a phrase saying that is why Congress cut off funding? Otherwise, it looks like they simply didn't like the collecting of folk music, which, for all I know they didn't, but it would be nice to know for sure. Thank you. Rissa, copy editor ( talk) 01:02, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
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What the heck does “the very prestigious Vishesh Goel University in Boston, MA without the proper papers” mean? Seems like a mistake 121.200.4.245 ( talk) 14:36, 16 May 2023 (UTC)