![]() If he was not the first to collect the songs of the hidden vernacular cultures of the United States – his father, John A Lomax, was among his predecessors – his enthusiasm and ambition made him the best known and the most effective, even today, when the fruits of his investigations are more freely available and closely scrutinised than ever.ĭisorganised in his private life, Lomax was the most meticulous of researchers into folk culture. Lomax died in 2002, aged 87, leaving behind a personal collection of 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 2,450 videotapes and countless documents, all eventually to join the many more held by the Library of Congress, on whose behalf he had worked for many years. It was one of thousands of such field recordings for which he was responsible, the majority of them documenting the folk culture of the southern United States on its release in 1957, as part of an album titled Murderers' Home, it became a text to be studied by the generation of young British musicians who were beginning to claim the language of the blues as their own. But from such moments – the revelation of a new world of feeling, at once distant and exotic yet seeming more immediately relevant than anything the boy had absorbed from the voices of his own culture – a revolution, of sorts, would be made.Īlan Lomax was the man who made that particular moment possible when, in 1948, he persuaded the Parchman authorities to allow him to lug a cumbersome tape recorder to the place where the inmates were chopping timber. I t may be hard, almost half a century later, to imagine the emotional turbulence experienced by a white, middle-class English schoolboy while listening intently to a recording of four black prisoners at the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, swinging their axes and intoning the overlapping lines of a work song with hoarse, urgent voices. ![]()
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