Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist and folklorist, known for his field recordings of folk music. The son of the folklorist John Lomax, he joined his father's collecting trips for the Library of Congress as a teenager and from 1937 to 1942 was Assistant in Charge of its Archive of Folk Song, recording Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and, in the Mississippi Delta, Muddy Waters and Son House. After Congress ended that funding in 1942 he collected independently in Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the Caribbean. His recordings, radio shows and concerts helped start the American and British folk revivals, and he later developed Cantometrics and argued for what he called cultural equity.