Two key elements preserved much of what has survived of of the New World's early folk music, and African-American folk music in particular. The technological element was recorded sound; the temperamental element was the dedicated obsessiveness that led a coterie of enthusiasts to document the achievements of obscure musicians that would otherwise have vanished into the street corner air.
The musicologist, writer, promoter, record producer and sometime disc jockey Alan Lomax, who died on July 18th aged 87, was one of the most respected of those enthusiasts.
The immense growth of interest in American folk music that began after the second World War, and continued into the blues and rhythm and blues revivalism of the 1950s and 1960s, could be attributed as much to his work as to that of any other single individual.
Iconic figures of the transition from unplugged rural blues to the streetcar clang of the amplified urban version - like Huddie Ledbetter and Muddy Waters - were brought from obscspread adulation by Alan Lomax. urity to wideThat Bob Dylan inspiration, Woody Guthrie, was similarly accorded the place in his country's cultural history he had long deserved when the musicologist investigated his work in the 1940s.
Alan Lomax hated the homogen-isation that the corporate recording industry imposed on 20th-century music. He felt that his work represented not simply the preservation of unique creativity, but was one of the keys with which humanity could unlock its past.
He also provided jazz historians with fascinating oral histories of the pre-recording era, such as the rambling, if self-aggrandising, monologues of the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton for the US Library of Congress, taped in the late 1930s. Morton's recollections are like a documentary film of a lost age, and, though he insisted he had invented jazz single-handed, the insights Alan Lomax's work gleaned none the less filled many gaps in the early jazz jigsaw. In 1949, he published the book Mr Jelly Roll.
Alan Lomax was born on January 31st, 1915, in Austin, Texas, the son of John Lomax, a musicologist who had studied the origins of cowboy songs. Alan Lomax studied philosophy at the University of Texas and anthropology at Columbia University, New York, but his principal pursuit in those years was helping his father.
In 1932, when he was 17, the two undertook what was then the most ambitious musicological field trip ever embarked on in the United States, a gruelling, four-month expedition to the mountains, sharecropping towns, penitentiaries and saloons of the southlands, sponsored by the Library of Congress. By the end of the decade, they had recorded more than 3,000 songs on an Edison cylinder machine, taking in urban and country blues, union and protest music inspired by the depression, Cajun music, gospel, jazz, voodoo music and much more.
The west African ancestry of many songs and performers mingled with the raucous, multicultural noise of a fast-changing America. Together, the Lomaxes wrote the studies American Ballads And Folk Songs (1934) and Our Singing Country (1941).
Alan Lomax made it clear that merely presenting this work divorced from the social conditions that had spawned it, or simply talent-spotting for recording stars, was not his objective. He frequently included contextualising interviews with the artists, and was messianic in his determination to get the story, whatever the obstacles - including sometimes being hounded out by local employers, convinced he was encouraging dissent.
In 1934, he and his father discovered the untutored genius of Ledbetter, serving a manslaughter sentence in Angola jail, Louisiana, and, at the end of the decade - after securing Ledbetter's parole - Alan Lomax produced the Leadbelly collection Negro Sinful Songs, a profound influence, in its explosive dignity, on future generations of folk and blues musicians.
Alan Lomax also documented the work of the blues guitarist and singer McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, who was to have a profound influence on the 1960s r&b boom. The postwar traditional jazz revival was also partly fuelled by Alan Lomax's work with Jelly Roll Morton.
Apart from his vast research, Alan Lomax had a busy radio career, from his weekly educational show on CBS in 1939, through his own programme, Back Where I Come From, and, in 1948, his hosting role for On Top Of Old Smokey. But though he had by now taken over his father's post as curator of the Archive of American Folk Song, and become director of folk music at Decca Records, McCarthyite America was an uncomfortable place for such a sympathiser with the underprivileged. From the mid-1950s, he began researching European folk music in England, Spain and Italy. When McCarthyism passed, he went home, and recommenced his fieldwork.
Alan Lomax was a purist and many of the popular mutations of the roots music he had unearthed did not appeal to him. He appeared to see himself as a forensic scientist, gathering evidence that would eventually release a truth otherwise ignored, give a voice to the voiceless, and, in the process, help the species understand its common humanity better.
Alan Lomax leaves a daughter and stepdaughter.
Alan Lomax: born 1915; died July 2002