Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music during the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, filmmaker and son of folklorist John Lomax. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S. and in England which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and especially the early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later, alone and with others. Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.