The Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, The Library of Congress

In 2004 the Library of Congress acquired the original recordings and photographs, media collections, library, manuscripts, and research materials that had been assembled by Alan Lomax over the course of six decades, uniting them with the recordings made by Alan and his father, John A. Lomax, for the Archive of American Folk Song from 1933 to 1942. The Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress is being processed by specialists at the American Folklife Center. ACE has been collaborating with the AFC on cataloging media, organizing the Performance Style & Culture Research Collection, collaborator research and notification, and additional preservation.

ACE maintains the digitally reformatted surrogates of Lomax’s recordings and papers.

For more information on these holdings and how to access them at the Library of Congress, please contact the American Folklife Center:

Todd Harvey, Folklife Specialist
Alan Lomax Collection
Library of Congress
American Folklife Center
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, D.C. 20540-4610
(202) 707-8245
tharvey@loc.gov

Overview of the Collection
Alan Lomax’s original recordings, media collections, library, and papers now live at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. For dissemination and research purposes, ACE retains digital masters of recordings and copies of certain field notes and letters. The entire assembly comprises sound and video recordings, films, and photographs made by Alan Lomax and many other collectors, published recordings, books, manuscripts, and research materials pertaining to music, dance, and narrative traditions from around the world. These diverse materials are interrelated through Lomax’s ongoing research and publishing projects. The long-playing records, sound recordings, and films are classified and indexed by culture.

Sound Recordings
Some 4,000 hours of recordings of traditional music, interviews, oral histories, and folk tales from all regions of world culture make up the Sound Recordings group. There are approximately 2,200 ¼” reel-to-reel tapes (paper-backed, cellulose-acetate, and polyester), 300 acetate transcription discs, 1,000 cassette tapes, and 200 DATs, including nearly 900 hours of Alan Lomax’s own recordings. In spite of their age, and Alan’s many moves and lack of money to provide them with optimal conditions for preservation, he took great care of them, and they are in excellent condition. This group falls into three main categories:

1. Recordings by Alan Lomax. Made in the field in the Southern United States, the Caribbean, Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Soviet Georgia, and in Alan’s own home, where he hosted numerous traditional singers. Also included are radio broadcasts, concert recordings, album masters, and Alan’s discussions and working sessions with colleagues.

2. Field Recordings by Other Collectors. This collection of recordings made by other collectors represents all regions of world culture. The work of many pioneering scholars is represented here, among them Jaap Kunst (Holland; Indonesia); Isabel Aretz (Argentina); Fosco Mariani (Ainu); Giorgio Nataletti and Diego Carpitella (Lucania; Sardinia; Italian-Albanian enclaves); Georges Condominas (Vietnam); Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson (Serbia and Czechoslovakia); Elizabeth Hopkins (Uganda); Chet Williams (Somalia); Frederica de Laguna (Pacific Northwest); Helmuth Fuchs (Guajiro, Maquiritare, South America); Anne Chapman (Ona, Argentina); Robert Gardner (Ethiopia); Francis Deng (Dinka, Sudan); Thomas Stanford (indigenous Mexico); Hugh Tracey (Anglophone Africa); Paul Bowles (Morocco); Malcolm Kirk (Asman, Irian Jaya, Trobriands, New Guinea); Tony Beamish and Ivan Polunin (Valley Laos, Sayaburi); Dick Katz (Khoi-San, Kalahari); Chad Wollner and Lin Lerner (Ethiopia, multi-ethnic). Many recordings also came from the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, the archives of Radio Moscow and the state archives of Romania and Uruguay.

This collection, along with Alan’s own recordings and the LP collection (see below), was the source of data for Cantometrics, a comparative study of the world’s music and its relationship to culture and the distribution of human populations, which was spearheaded by Lomax, Conrad Arensberg, and Victor Grauer in the early 1960s.

These recordings came to the archive decades ago pursuant to gifts and special agreements and were used for research and in educational publications. Most are copies, but they may be the only extant ones. On behalf of the American Folklife Center, ACE has contacted the hundreds of collectors who contributed to this research collection to update their contact information, confirm their status as custodians of the rights, and to notify them that such tapes (or films) have been moved to the Library of Congress where they constitute a special collection.

3. Compilations for Cantometrics and Parlametrics. Drawing upon the field recordings and the LP collection (see below), the Cantometrics team assembled compilations illustrating characteristics of singing style. These compilations were used for research, for teaching and presentations, and in developing a teaching system for Cantometrics. This group comprises nearly 400 hours of recordings on ¼” open-reel tape. The Cantometrics dataset of 5,400 songs, selected, coded, and analyzed from 1961 to 1994, consists of 300 hours of recordings stored on 156 DATs.

Film
1. Dance and Movement Film Collection. This collection was assembled from 1961 to 1994 by Alan Lomax, Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay, and their research assistants, who solicited the world’s ethnographic institutes, film distributors, television companies, embassies, and private archives for data for their pioneering study of world dance. One of the most diverse libraries of dance film in the world, it contains ethnographic, documentary, and news films and footage produced by dozens of independent scholars, filmmakers, and television journalists. While its special focus is on indigenous and traditional folk dance and movement, it also includes footage of modern dance, ballet, and staged classical dance traditions from Asia, Africa and Western Europe.

The collection consists of an estimated 150,000 feet of 16mm and 35mm of film in the form of both complete films and segments copied from originals. It is indexed by culture area and is extensively annotated in six linear feet of indices detailing the films’ contents, provenance, authorship, format, and Choreometric analysis.

Three distinct subgroups were compiled from the film collection:

• The Cord Library of film segments illustrating the Choreometrics variables;

• The Rhythms of Earth teaching film series (Dance and Human History, Palm Play, Step Style, and The Longest Trail) — finished films and work elements; and

• Thematic compilations of film segments for films in planning, illustrating further research results of Choreometrics.

2. 1966 Newport Folk Festival. Performances by Howling Wolf, Son House, Bukka White, Skip James, Canray Fontenot, Bois Sec Ardoin, Bessie Jones, Ed Young and the Southern Fife and Drum Corps, Clark Kessinger, and Jimmy Driftwood, among others. (55,000 feet of 16mm film.)

3. Ballads, Blues, and Bluegrass. Directed by George Pickow and Alan Lomax. Featuring Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Memphis Slim, Roscoe Holcomb, Memphis Slim, and others performing in Alan Lomax’s Greenwich Village apartment in 1961. (Twenty canisters of finished film and work elements, including A&B rolls, camera originals, and work prints.)

4. The Land Where the Blues Began. 1979 film version by John Bishop and Alan Lomax, exploring the enduring African-American performance traditions of the Mississippi Delta. Featuring bluesmen R. L. Burnside and Jack Owens; tall-tale tellers; fife and drum bands; diddley-bow players; and former prisoners, railroad workers, and roustabouts singing field hollers, work chants, and levee camp songs. (Four canisters of camera originals, work elements, and finished film.)

Video
Footage shot in the field under Alan Lomax’s direction from 1979 through 1985 in the American South; Arizona; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and New York in preparation for a series of PBS programs entitled American Patchwork. Represented are former levee and railroad workers, farm women, bluesmen, and versifiers from the Mississippi Delta; New Orleans funeral and jazz parades; Cajun cowboys; Sea Island children; Yaqui Indian dancers and Norteño musicians from Arizona; Sacred Harp singers from Alabama; miners, black fiddlers, and storytellers from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee; bootleggers, tobacco workers, and flatfoot dancers from North Carolina; cloggers and bluegrass bands from Georgia; breakdancers from Pennsylvania; Italian and Italian American folk musicians at the Giglio Festival in Brooklyn, New York; and folk artists from around the country at the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival. Of interest also are interviews with Alan Lomax, filmed for use in the series. (400 hours of U-Matic video)

DigiBeta, DVCam and DVD copies are retained at ACE.

Papers
Alan Lomax’s papers fill 61 file cabinet drawers occupying 262 linear feet. Together, paper and digital documents fall into three groupings.

1. Manuscripts and Correspondence. These pertain to Alan Lomax’s daily work, field research, writing, publishing, productions, and myriad other projects, and include correspondence, manuscripts, drafts, corrected typescripts, field notes, field diaries and memorabilia, logs, memorabilia, work papers (a term used by Alan), research materials, ideas, grants, and pertinent financial papers. These documents have been processed at the Library of Congress. ACE retains contracts, agreements, permissions, and copies of selected papers.

2. The Performance Style & Culture Research Collection. A multifaceted group of materials documenting a 40-year program of comparative research on music, dance, and speech spearheaded by Alan Lomax from 1956 through 1995, which discovered families of expressive style representing the world’s oldest principal traditions.

Comprising more than 100 linear feet of paper files housed in 200 document boxes and 100 binders of indices, plus 200 binders of mainframe computer runs and 150 boxes of punch cards created during the early years of the project — all linked to recorded examples on tape and film (the project data) — this is the largest assemblage among Alan Lomax’s collected works. This research collection was compiled and annotated at ACE, and is available to researchers at the Library of Congress.

3. Global Jukebox. The Global Jukebox is a prototype multimedia program bringing together all facets of the Performance Style Research in a dynamic platform. Four drawers of papers and some 8,000 computer files pertaining to the Jukebox, plus hardware, are for the time being retained at ACE.

4. Personal Papers. Four boxes of personal letters and diaries are in the custody of Alan Lomax’s Estate. Such personal papers that are sprinkled among the Manuscripts at the Library of Congress may be under some restrictions.

Photographs
In the early 1950s, Alan Lomax began to document his field trips with the camera as well as the recording machine. There are over 5,000 black and white negatives and prints of photographs taken by Lomax during his recording trips in England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Italy, the Caribbean, and the Southern U.S., and 750 color slides and prints from the Caribbean and Lomax’s American Patchwork project. From other sources there are 2,000 archival images (negatives and prints) of performers, Alan Lomax, and his friends and family. ACE houses one set of duplicated negatives and all TIFF and JPEG surrogates; Alan Lomax’s Estate retains many original black and white prints and personal photos. 

The LP Collection
The LP Library is composed of nearly 1,700 commercial LPs of folk and indigenous music from all over the world. It is organized according to culture area and geographic region.

Books
Alan Lomax's reference library of books of folklore, literature, ethnography, social sciences, and musicology is now housed at the Library of Congress.