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Ambassador of the Blues: Folklorist Alan Lomax |
| Section: LIFE / PROFILE |
| Author: Eric P. Olsen |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1997 |
| Size: 2,700 Words, 17,638 Characters |
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Although this has been called the age of anxiety, it might better be termed the century of the blues," wrote folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax in his autobiographical work The Land Where the Blues Began (1993). "Feelings of anomie and alienation, of orphaning and rootlessness--the sense of being a commodity rather than a person; the loss of love and of family and of place--this modern syndrome was the norm for the cotton farmers and the transient laborers of the Deep South a century ago."
It would be hard to overestimate the aesthetic debt Americans owe to not just the blues but the enduring and self-fertilizing tradition of African-American music. It would be hard likewise to overestimate the seminal role Lomax played in emancipating this tradition from the constraints of popular, often racist, prejudices. In the mid-nineties, the originality and influence of African-American music can no longer be in doubt. As novelist Richard Wright wrote almost forty years ago, "In every large city of the earth where lonely, disinherited men congregate for pleasure or amusement, the orgiastic wail of the blues, and their strident offspring, jazz, can be heard."
For those whose tastes run to blues and folk music, the name of Alan Lomax is legendary, a ubiquitous presence on album covers and in learned music reviews. Indeed, when cultural historians study the twentieth century in perspective, he surely must figure as one of the visionary few who saw in music the signature of our collective human identity.
Lomax is "the man who is more responsible than any other person for the twentieth-century folk-song revival," says Pete Seeger, himself among the most influential figures in folk music since Woody Guthrie (who Lomax incidentally first...
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...rguing such matters with Alan Lomax.
An architect of cultural brotherhood, Lomax is a pioneer whose vision and empathy for the marginalized over a career of six decades have changed what we know of ourselves. Folklore, Lomax said, in what could well be an epithet for his career, could "provide ten thousand bridges across which men from all nations may stride to say, 'You are my brother.' "
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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