April 7, 2018

Alan Lomax's folk music archive now available on line

NPR - Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It's part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection — long before the age of the Internet.

Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. 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.

"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. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That is WONDERFUL!!!

I can think of no one who did more to preserve traditional music. Mo Asch, who founded Folkways would come close, and the Warners, who recorded and documented the Hicks and Proffitt families, but damned few others.