Alan Lomax American folklorist, ethnomusicologist, writer, scientist, political activist and filmmaker Date of Birth: 15.01.1915 Country: USA

Alan Lomax: American Folklorist, Ethnomusicologist, Writer, Scholar, Political Activist, and Filmmaker

Alan Lomax was born on January 15, 1915, in Austin, Texas, and was the third of four children of folklorist and writer John Lomax. His successful career began with his father, collecting and recording songs performed by field workers and prisoners from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Due to his fragile health, suffering from asthma and frequent ear infections, Lomax received most of his elementary education at home. He attended the Terrill School for Boys in Dallas, where he excelled academically. At the age of 15, he completed the eighth grade in 1930.

Despite his father's hopes for him to attend Harvard, Lomax chose to enroll at the University of Texas at Austin due to his mother's deteriorating health. In college, he studied Nietzsche and developed a passion for philosophy. During this time, his mother passed away, and his 10-year-old sister, Bess, was sent to live with their aunt.

At the age of 17, Lomax took a break from his studies to assist his father in collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress. He obtained a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Texas in 1936.

In February 1937, he married Elizabeth L. Harold, and they were together for 12 years. During their marriage, they had a daughter named Anne. Elizabeth assisted Alan in collecting and recording folk music and even wrote a script for a folk opera on the radio. In 1961, he married Antoinette Marchand, but their relationship ended in divorce in 1967.

During the economic reforms of the "New Deal" period, Alan, along with his father, recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. He became a legendary collector of 20th-century folk music and produced various recordings, albums, concerts, and radio programs in the United States and England. Many of his works played a significant role in the revival of the American and British folk movements in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

In the late 1970s, Lomax completed his long-delayed memoir, "The Land Where the Blues Began," which connected the birth of blues music to issues of race, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lomax served as the head of the Smithsonian Institution's folklore festival and produced a series of films about folk music called "American Patchwork."

Alan Lomax passed away on July 19, 2002, in Safety Harbor, Florida. In January 2012, an extensive archive of his work was released in digital format. During the last 20 years of his life, Lomax worked on the interactive multimedia educational project called "Global Jukebox," which included 5,000 hours of audio recordings, 3,000 video recordings, and 5,000 photographs. Today, approximately 17,400 recordings collected by Lomax since 1946 are freely accessible online.