Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World - Softcover

Szwed, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143120735 ISBN 13: 9780143120735

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2011

Synopsis

The definitive biography of Alan Lomax-from John Szwed,"the best music biographer in the business" (L.A. Weekly).

One of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, Alan Lomax was best known for bringing legendary musicians like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives to the radio and introducing folk music to a mass audience. Now John Szwed, the acclaimed biographer of Miles Davis and Sun Ra, presents the first biography of Lomax, a man who was as influential as he was controversial-trailed for years by the FBI, criticized for his folk- song-collecting practices, denounced by some as a purist and by others as a popularizer. This authoritative work reveals how Lomax changed not only the way everyone in the country heard music but also the way they viewed America itself.

About this title

About the Author:

John Szwed is the author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis and Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra, among other works. He is a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* The scope of Alan Lomax’s protean and profoundly influential life’s work grants him the designations folklorist, musicologist, oral historian, photographer, filmmaker, recording and concert producer, anthropologist, archivist, activist, and author. But even this litany barely covers Lomax’s pioneering documentation of music born of pain and injustice, his crossing racial lines in the segregated South to collect African American songs, and his bringing folk music into the mainstream. Szwed, a biographer of Miles Davis and professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University, gamely charts Lomax’s itinerant, messianic, world-changing endeavors, beginning with his start as his folk-music-collecting father’s assistant and on to his myriad inventive and demanding ethnomusicology projects, his barely surviving on grants and Library of Congress stipends, his run-ins with the FBI and embroilment in controversies, and his continual self-reinvention. Here are the full stories of Lomax’s pivotal relationships with Zora Neale Hurston, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, Pete Seeger, and Margaret Mead. Factually tireless and fluently analytical, Szwed gamely corrals a great river of events, efforts, and discoveries into a straight-ahead portrait of an intrepid, culture-defining artist and humanist. Driven by a voracious hunger for life and unshakable faith in art, Lomax forever sought the “flame of beauty.” --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0143120735
• ISBN 13: 9780143120735
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448