arsclist NYTimes Editorial: A Legendary Collector

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A Legendary Collector
NY Times Editorial
July 23, 2002

In 1910, five years before Alan Lomax was born, his father,
John Lomax, published a collection called "Cowboy Songs."
The book was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, who, in
praising it, wrote, "Under modern conditions . . . the
native ballad is speedily killed by competition with the
music-hall songs." The music-hall song was itself killed
long ago, but the process Roosevelt describes still goes
on. The amateur feels defeated by the professional. Local
music dies at the hand of a national and now international
music industry. We have all become like the cowboys
Roosevelt described, "ashamed to sing the crude homespun
ballads." 

Alan Lomax, who died last Friday at age 87, devoted his
long life and his unstinting energies to recording those
ballads and their singers and to opposing the
homogenization of culture under the pressure of mass
marketing. Mr. Lomax's influence on the shape of popular
music is incalculable. The names he brought to light or
documented are legendary now in themselves - among them
Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters -
and there is almost no overstating their importance for
later musicians. Mr. Lomax, following his father, came onto
the scene at just the right time, when the advent of
recording equipment made it possible to preserve a wealth
of indigenous music that had not yet been stifled by
commercial music. The paradox, of course, is that, by
recording it, Mr. Lomax made much of this barroom,
prison-house, cotton-field, ranch-hand music commercial in
its own right. 

No one knew better than Alan Lomax that the act of
recording even spontaneous, improvised music imposed a
uniformity upon it, froze it, so to speak. He knew that
sometimes he could save a piece of music by recording it
and that sometimes he caught it just as it was dying and
that sometimes the act of recording it helped kill it. But
he was in it for the music, not the money. His gift to all
of us was to capture voice after voice, song after song
that would have vanished into thin air otherwise. Those
voices and songs enrich our national musical legacy, of
course, but they also remind us that a great music of the
people arises only from the people themselves. 


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/opinion/23TUE4.html?ex=1028468101&ei=1&en=0f8a82beab9d501e

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