He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox).

[17] A pioneering oral historian, Lomax recorded substantial interviews with many folk, blues, and jazz musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, and Big Bill Broonzy.

And when he returned nearly three months later, having driven thousands of miles on barely paved roads, it was with a cache of 250 discs and 8 reels of film, documents of the incredible range of ethnic diversity, expressive traditions, and occupational folklife in Michigan.

As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet.

In 1940, under Lomax's supervision, RCA made two groundbreaking suites of commercial folk music recordings: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly's The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs.

[21] In 1940, Lomax and his close friend Nicholas Ray wrote and produced the 15-minute program Back Where I Came From, which aired three nights per week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically.

"[24] Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development.

The 1944 "ballad opera", The Martins and the Coys, broadcast in Britain (but not the U.S.) by the BBC, featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, among others, was released on Rounder Records in 2000.

Radio Project in 1949, creating a number of "ballad dramas" featuring country and gospel superstars, including Roy Acuff, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (among others), that aimed to convince men and women suffering from syphilis to seek treatment.

[29] In December 1949, a newspaper printed a story, "Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers'", that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists.

The article mentioned Alan Lomax as one of the sponsors of the dinner, along with C. B. Baldwin, campaign manager for Henry A. Wallace in 1948; music critic Olin Downes of The New York Times; and W. E. B.

(Others listed included Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Yip Harburg, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Burl Ives, Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, and Josh White.)

That summer, Congress was debating the McCarran Act, which required the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies",[31] while the House Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings.

[33] Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly invented LP records.

His ballad opera Big Rock Candy Mountain premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot.

[44] In 1962, Lomax and singer and civil rights activist Guy Carawan, music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961–62 for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on Vanguard Records.

Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; Azerbaijani mugham performed by two balaban players,[45] a Sicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska;[46] in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more.

Similar ideas had been put into practice by Benjamin Botkin, Harold W. Thompson, and Louis C. Jones, who believed that folklore studied by folklorists should be returned to its home communities to enable it to thrive anew.

They have been realized in the annual (since 1967) Smithsonian Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (for which Lomax served as a consultant), in national and regional initiatives by public folklorists and local activists in helping communities gain recognition for their oral traditions and lifeways both in their home communities and in the world at large; and in the National Heritage Awards, concerts, and fellowships given by the NEA and various State governments to master folk and traditional artists.

Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels...With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it livable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need.

Looking for leads, the FBI seized on the fact that, at the age of 17 in 1932 while attending Harvard University for a year, Lomax had been arrested in Boston, Massachusetts in connection with a political demonstration.

But Alan had also not been happy there and probably also wanted to be nearer his bereaved[citation needed] father and young sister, Bess, and to return to the close friends he had made during his first year at the University of Texas.

In June 1942 the FBI approached the Librarian of Congress, Archibald McLeish, in an attempt to have Lomax fired as Assistant in Charge of the Library's Archive of American Folk Song.

At the time, Lomax was preparing for a field trip to the Mississippi Delta on behalf of the Library, where he made landmark recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, among others.

This same source adds that he suspected Lomax's peculiarity and poor grooming habits came from associating with the "hillbillies" who provided him with folk tunes.Lomax, who was a founding member of People's Songs, was in charge of campaign music for Henry A. Wallace's 1948 Presidential run on the Progressive Party ticket on a platform opposing the arms race and supporting civil rights for Jews and African Americans.

The Service took the view that Lomax' work compiling his collections of world folk music gave him a legitimate reason to contact the attaché, and that while his views (as demonstrated by his choice of songs and singers) were undoubtedly left wing, there was no need for any specific action against him.The file contains a partial record of Lomax' movements, contacts and activities while in Britain, and includes for example a police report of the "Songs of the Iron Road" concert at St Pancras in December 1953.

However, William Tompkins, assistant attorney general, wrote to Hoover that the investigation had failed to disclose sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution or the suspension of Lomax's passport.

Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project he called the Global Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs.

I was at the beginning of a new project supported by the National Agricultural Library (USDA, ARS) and was looking for a piece of software that had been touted as a solid solution to the puzzle of "natural language queries," - new to us at the time.

It extensively used samples from field recordings collected by Lomax on the 1993 box set Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta.