American History of Music

A hundred years ago John Lomax of Texas collected cowboy songs, and called them folk songs, even though he knew who wrote them, and the words were not ancient. Thirty years later his son Alan, who was helping his father lug the 200 pounds of batteries and disc recorders in and out of the car in the early 1930s, said "Father, I want to carry on your work." (Jerrold, 1992) So at the age of twenty-two, Alan was installed by his father as Acting Curator of Folk Songs for the Library of Congress. Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular." If you lived in the city, the vernacular was jazz. If you lived in the country, it was country music. If you were an ethnic group, be it Spanish or Jewish, it was the music of your personal background, the musical equivalent of the language you spoke. My father urged Alan not to repeat the mistakes of the European folklorists who, a century ago, had collected these peasant songs and then arranged them for part choir and accompanied them on piano, and then told the young people of their country, "Don't change a note, this is our sacred heritage." (Jerrold, 1992)

Lomax has since spent a lifetime writing about and recording the world's folk music, traveling to Spain, Haiti, Scotland, Germany, Ireland and Africa. At age 79, he is one of the world's top musicologists. Music critic and author Stanley Crouch, who is currently writing a biography of Charlie Parker, calls Lomax "a major figure in American culture. Through his work we get a real sense of the American identity as it expresses itself in music." (Jerrold, 1992)

By 1959, Lomax was determined to fully document the Southern folk tradition. As he crisscrossed the southern United States, his ear for true musicianship enabled him to locate music buried under poverty and marginalized by racism. Lomax was well aware of the racial terrain he was negotiating. The harassment he suffered, as a white man associating with blacks during Jim Crow, often cemented his credibility and helped him win the trust of musicians. Yet, even with the difficulties, Lomax's color allowed him to document African-American music in a way no black man would have been able to do at the time.

His compilation of 105 songs - black and white spirituals, bluegrass, blues, mountain fiddle bands, the work chants of ax gangs and African-based dance rhythms augmented by cane fifes and panpipes - were culled from 80 hours of recordings and originally released as the seven-volume Southern Heritage Folk Series; they are now available in the four-CD box set Sounds of the South (Jerrold, 1992).

The four discs of Sounds of the South are classified by region and musical style: fiddle and hillbilly music from the Blue ...