John Szwed’s Alan Lomax biography in-depth and fascinating

book-cover-alan-lomaxA book about ethonomusicologist and folk historian Alan Lomax has been due for many years now. Lomax’s work for the Library of Congress alone should merit him a place in the hearts and minds of all Americans for his efforts to investigate and preserve our musical heritage. This is to say nothing of his programs for CBS, PBS, and the BBC, as well as his many books and articles. Despite all this, however, Lomax is frequently confused with his father, John, as well as Harry Smith, whose Anthology of American Folk Music so beloved by ’60s Greenwich strummers most likely would not have been possible with Lomax’s work.

Author John Szwed knew Alan Lomax, but that does not mean Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World is a fawning tribute. Actually, the tone is appreciative, if unflinching. The style of the prose took on in my mind the voice of David McCullough, who has narrated so many of Ken Burns’ documentaries. The whole of the Lomax biography is like that, really: it has an authoritative, if slightly folksy, tone that is in-depth, if not over-detailed.

There are no listings of every artist Lomax recorded. Szwed opts instead to present an overview of Lomax’s work, which allows the reader to get the feel for the entirety of whatever the musicologist was working on at the time, rather than any specific task. In the “Haitian Honeymoon” chapter, the fifty hours of recorded music includes:

“music associated with Vodou, Mardi Gras, Catholicism, old French romance ballads, the works songs of the collective groups (the konbits), as well as folktales, children’s game songs, bands of all sorts, jazz and classical music, and three songs by Zora Neale Hurston that had nothing to do with Haiti.”

That list sums up in what Lomax was interested – that being that “folk music” was exactly that. While it might have eventually become something that best described white bearded men and thin women in spectacles singing in slightly reedy voices, it first meant “music of the people.” It knew neither genre nor race nor religion. Alan Lomax would spend his entire life trying to spread the word that folk music was a living thing, working incessantly, and for little money.

The Man Who Recorded the World does an amazing job of capturing Lomax’s unceasing energy. It does so without tinting anything rose-colored, presenting Lomax’s many dalliances with women who were both younger than him and not his wife matter-of-factly, without any sort of salacious gossip. That gossip and speculation is more than thoroughly provided by the various quotes from the FBI and CIA files which were kept on Lomax.

Lomax’s work was such that on one page (230, for the record), he is shown to be helping Woody Guthrie with his book House of Earth, shopping two radio programs, and working on his own field recordings with the Library of Congress. Happily, it is not until the latter chapters of the book that the relation of his unceasing work becomes overly difficult to enjoy. The chapters which precede the finale are rather detailed, containing as they do “The Science of Folk Song,” which describe such the field of phonotactics, which when combines with kinetics would allow one to listen to a recording and determine the posture and physical appearance of someone as they recorded a song. This would come to be called “cantometrics,” which would allow one to measure a song by certain properties (something which would later be used to great effect by Pandora and Allmusic).

This scientifically dense material (when compared with the more adventurous and sociologically-minded earlier chapters) leave the final chapters to be crammed with the last decade of Lomax’s life. Packing fifteen years into one chapter, as well as the conclusion, makes for a slightly rushed and hurried read, but Szwed nonetheless acquits himself well with Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. By avoiding the pitfalls of so many other biographies, which attempt to present a critique or analysis of the person whom the portray, Szwed opts instead to let Lomax offer up an analysis of himself, through his many letters, and that allows the reader to develop their own opinions of the man, rather than having one presented to them.