From the Archives - GhettoBlaster magazine article about Alan Lomax archives

Alan Lomax in 1959. From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity.

From the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center,Library of Congress.Used by permission of the Association for Cultural Equity.

I wrote an article about the Association for Cultural Equity's Nathan Salsburg for GhettoBlaster Magazine: Music, Film, Culture, Film in the Summer of 2012! Back then, and still now, I think a lot, a lot,  a lot about Alan Lomax. Musicologist, writer, and producer Alan Lomax spent over six decades immersed in world’s people and folk music and oral traditions. But was the way he worked ok? What was his connection to the communities and people? How did it all work? I think about this in relation to my own work, and documentation of people and places not my own. 

Alan Lomax was a kind of pioneer in the repatriation of cultural documentation. "He deposited copies of his large collections in national archives at a time when tape and disc media made it difficult and expensive to do so, and, whenever possible, sent recordings to his colleagues and sources in the field," says the Association for Cultural Equity. 

I really admire the work of Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), for their work repatriating collections and materials to the communities and people from which they came. This runs counter to extractive reporting, documentation and recording that removes the communities from the work they create, share, and pass on. The way it works is ACE partners with libraries and cultural organizations to bring home the compelling music, photographs, film, video, interviews, and research from the Alan Lomax Archive, reaching out as well to their virtual and diasporic communities.  

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​You can learn more about ACE's repatriation projects in the U.S., Spain, Italy, and the Caribbean ON THEIR WEBSITE HERE.

​And if you want, read my 2012 article/interview about it all here.

GhettoBlaster Magazine: Music, Film, Culture, Film
Association for Cultural Equity's Nathan Salsburg
Summer 2012 
By Caroline Losneck

Many of the most important people in our history seem to have FBI files, and in the case of Alan Lomax, this includes folk documentarians.

Despite a 1940-1960 FBI open file on him that states “Neighborhood investigation shows him to be a very peculiar individual in that he is only interested in folk lore music, being very temperamental and ornery. ... He has no sense of money values, handling his own and Government property in a neglectful manner, and paying practically no attention to his personal appearance. … He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results,” Alan Lomax is perhaps the most significant figure in the arc of ethnomusicology, documentation and folk traditions in the United States and beyond. He also is the man behind extensive recordings of some of the greats and folks recognized as the backbone of American music like Jelly Roll Morton, Big Bill Broonzy, Bessie Jones, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Muddy Waters among many, many others. 

The big news is that in February of this year, the Alan Lomax Archive and the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) launched the massive ACE Online Archive, the result of over a decade of the restoration, digitization and cataloging of Alan Lomax’s life work in documentation, research, and sweeping appreciation for folk music and oral traditions. 

Continue reading this ARTICLE HERE, for free. 

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