"He believed that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field," she says. But that never stopped Alan Lomax, and it hasn't deterred Anna Lomax Wood, either. He did it out of the passion he had for it, and found ways to fund projects that were closest to his heart." "Alan scraped by the whole time, and left with no money. "There was never any money in it for Alan," says Fleming. But Fleming says the New York offices still exude the DIY vibe they had when Lomax was working there - right down to the collection of castoff chairs and desks, none of which seem to match. Most of Lomax's original recordings and notes are now stored at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The Association for Cultural Equity is housed in a rundown building near the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan. Now that his archives are online, the organization he founded is turning its attention to that job.
Lomax was forced to stop working when his health declined in the '90s, and he left the Global Jukebox unfinished. But the basic idea was simple: Make it all available to anyone, anywhere in the world. He hoped the Global Jukebox would make it easy to compare music across different cultures and continents using a complex analytical system he devised - kind of like Pandora for grad students. He imagined a tool that would integrate thousands of sound recordings, films, videotapes and photographs made by himself and others. In a 1991 interview with CBS, he said, "The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind."
#JOHN LOMAX TV#
Lomax wrote and hosted radio and TV shows, and he spent the last 20 years of his career experimenting with computers to create something he called the Global Jukebox. Later, Alan Lomax hauled giant tape recorders powered by car batteries out to backwoods shacks and remote villages. When he started working with his father, John Lomax, in the '30s, that meant recording on metal cylinders.
Throughout his career, Lomax was always using the latest technology to record folk music in the field and then share it with anyone who was interested. Alan was a person who looked to all the gambits you could. He would've just been so excited," says Anna Lomax Wood, Lomax's daughter and president of the Association for Cultural Equity. "For the first time, everything that we've digitized of Alan's field recording trips are online, on our website," says Fleming. History Hear An Interview With Alan Lomax On 'Fresh Air' Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings. "We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible," says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the '80s.
#JOHN LOMAX HOW TO#
When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren't quite sure how to tackle the problem. He worked from the 1930s to the '90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. It's part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection - long before the age of the Internet.
#JOHN LOMAX FOR FREE#
Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. Shirley Collins/Courtesy of Alan Lomax Archiveįolklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world.
Alan Lomax (right) with musician Wade Ward during the Southern Journey recordings, 1959-1960.