Alan Lomax, a pioneering sound recordist featured on BBC Great Lives

The BBC Great Lives podcast, features an interviewer, a person who has nominated the subject and an ‘expert witness’. The subject on the 24th April 2019’s podcast was Alan Lomax, an American ethnomusicologist who died in 2002.

According to Wikipedia, Lomax ‘played an important part in preserving the folk music of the United States, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Ireland and the Caribbean. This helped to start the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s until the early 1960s. He recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the American Library of Congress on aluminium and acetate discs. Initially Lomax had funding from the Library of Congress to undertake the collection of songs and interviews in the United States however it was cut in 1942. Lomax continued to independently collect in his own country as well as others that are listed above.’ In 2004 the material Lomax had collected post-1942 was acquired by the Library of Congress. This collection of songs and interviews has now been digitised and has been made available online.

One of the many singers Alan Lomax is credited with finding, is Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) who was discovered in a prison in the American Deep South.

It is an interesting podcast about a person who is not very well-known however was very influential in his field of work.