World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Philip V. Bohlman

World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Philip V. Bohlman

Author:Philip V. Bohlman [Bohlman, Philip V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-05-29T16:00:00+00:00


The Lomax family and the genealogy of American folk music scholarship

Just as there are genealogies of folk musicians, so too are there genealogies of folk music scholars. Whether one is modelled upon the other remains an open question, but there can be no question that the study of folk music accords high value to the transmission of music from one generation to the next, as well as laterally from one branch of a family to another. Genealogical metaphors fill the discourse characterizing oral tradition (e.g. the ‘tune families’ of Anglo-American folk song). In the course of the 20th century two families of folk musicians and folk music scholars played a particularly dominant role in the collection, publication, and dissemination of American folk music – one with Charles Seeger (see Chapter 1) at its dynastic head, the other with John Lomax playing the foundational role – and it is to the Lomaxes that we turn briefly to understand the dynamics of genealogies that sustain a broad public support of folk music during a century of rapid modernization.

John Avery Lomax (1867–1948), Alan Lomax (b. 1915), and Beth Lomax Hawes (b. 1921) all devoted their entire lives to the many branches of folk music scholarship. Although Beth Lomax Hawes was a member of the well-known folk-revival group the Almanac Singers for over a decade (1941–52), the Lomax family largely approached folk music as scholars and popularists. If there is a theoretical common denominator shared by the entire family, it was that folk music belonged to those who made it but must be shared with a broader public, thus weaving a web of culture whose strands depended on the dissemination of folk music. The Lomaxes were ideologically liberal, at times openly radical, and yet they never shied away from working with government agencies, indeed heading government agencies, willing to support folk music. John Lomax became curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1933, and Beth Lomax Hawes was director of the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1992. Above all, the Lomaxes held that folk music was a resource, and the very public nature of that resource meant that it must be shared and invested with the values of the national collective.

The publications of the Lomaxes provide a counterpoint to the history of the 20th century, beginning locally in the United States and, at the beginning of the 21st century, expanding in increasingly global directions. The history that the numerous collections of and monographs on folk music traces begins in the American West, with John Lomax’s pioneering study of cowboy songs, unfolds through a series of volumes that gave voice to African Americans and the downtrodden, and shifts to broader arenas that portend globalization theory. So expansive were and are the Lomax projects that several, especially the production of CDs from the Alan Lomax ‘World Library of Folk and Primitive Music’, are projected to last long into the future. The



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