Those of us who enjoy folk and blues
music have a lot to thank Lomax for. Dragging 300 pounds of recording equipment
with him he traveled across the American south in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s recording
music that has since vanished. He introduced folk music – the traditional,
made-at-home stuff, not the Bob Dylan/Joan Baez/Judy Collins folk music – to America
through his radio shows, books, concerts, and his work at the Archive of
American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.
Here’s the blurb from POV’s web site:
Alan Lomax was "the song hunter." He devoted his life to
recording the world's folk tunes before they would permanently disappear with
the rise of the modern music industry. In "Lomax the Songhunter,"
filmmaker Rogier Kappers seeks to tell Lomax's story by interviewing friends
such as Pete Seeger, combining it with archival recordings of music greats
Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and gathering footage of the cotton fields, rock
quarries and prisons where Alan Lomax captured America's quintessential music.
Finally, Kappers followed the route that Lomax took so many years ago and
traveled around Europe in an old Volkswagen to remote villages in Spain and Italy,
hearing memories and music from the farmers, shepherds and weavers whose songs
Lomax recorded decades earlier.”
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