Alan Lomax
The song collector
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist who spent seven decades recording the traditional music of the world.
Born in Austin, Texas, in 1915, Lomax began collecting at eighteen, travelling the American South with his father John Lomax to record songs for the Library of Congress. They carried a disc recorder weighing hundreds of pounds into prisons, churches, farms and lumber camps. Among the musicians he recorded were Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, in long interviews of 1938, and a young Muddy Waters in 1941.
In 1935 he travelled with Zora Neale Hurston to record in Georgia, Florida and the Bahamas. After the war he recorded across Britain, Ireland, Spain and Italy, and later developed methods for comparing the song styles of cultures around the world. He died in Florida in 2002.
Many of the singers he recorded left no other trace. The Order honours Lomax for the work of preservation in its purest form: carrying the voices of ordinary people, and the traditions they had kept, into the memory of the world.