Editing Alan Lomax (section)

==World music and digital legacy==
[[Brian Eno]] wrote of Lomax's later recording career in his notes to accompany an anthology of Lomax's world recordings:

<blockquote>[He later] turned his intelligent attentions to music from many other parts of the world, securing for them a dignity and status they had not previously been accorded. The "[[World Music]]" phenomenon arose partly from those efforts, as did his great book, ''Folk Song Style and Culture''. I believe this is one of the most important books ever written about music, in my all time top ten. It is one of the very rare attempts to put cultural criticism onto a serious, comprehensible, and rational footing by someone who had the experience and breadth of vision to be able to do it.<ref>Brian Eno, in liner notes to the ''Alan Lomax Collection Sampler'' (Rounder Records, 1997)</ref></blockquote>

In January 2012, the [[American Folklife Center]] at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that it would release Lomax's vast archive in digital form. Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project he called the [[Cantometrics#Cantometrics as an educational tool|Global Jukebox]], which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.thetakeaway.org/2012/jan/31/the-global-jukeboxs-premiere/ |title=The Premiere of the Global Jukebox |website=The Takeaway |date=January 31, 2012 |access-date=September 24, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120202124514/http://www.thetakeaway.org/2012/jan/31/the-global-jukeboxs-premiere/ |archive-date=February 2, 2012}}</ref> By February 2012, 17,000 music tracks from his archived collection were expected to be made available for free streaming, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.<ref name=nyt-97th>{{cite news| url = https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/arts/music/the-alan-lomax-collection-from-the-american-folklife-center.html/partner/rssnyt?_r=1&pagewanted=all| title = Folklorist's Global Jukebox Goes Digital| author = Rohter, Larry| date = January 30, 2012| access-date = January 31, 2012| newspaper = The New York Times}}</ref>

As of March 2012 this has been accomplished. Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online.<ref name="ACEmusic">{{cite web|title=Lomax Digital Archive|url=https://archive.culturalequity.org/|access-date=|publisher=Association for Cultural Equity}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/03/28/148915022/alan-lomaxs-massive-archive-goes-online |title=Alan Lomax's Massive Archive Goes Online : The Record |publisher=NPR |date=March 28, 2012 |access-date=September 8, 2015}}</ref> This is material from Alan Lomax's independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by the Association for Cultural Equity. This is "distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection – which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax's prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) – is the provenance of the American Folklife Center"<ref name = ACEmusic/> at the Library of Congress.

{{update|date=October 2021}}

On August 24, 1997, at a concert at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, [[Bob Dylan]] said about Lomax, who had helped introduce him to folk music and whom he had known as a young man in [[Greenwich Village]]:

<blockquote>There is a distinguished gentlemen here who came...I want to introduce him – named Alan Lomax. I don't know if many of you have heard of him [Audience applause.] Yes, he's here, he's made a trip out to see me. I used to know him years ago. I learned a lot there and Alan...Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we've got anybody to thank, it's Alan. Thanks, Alan.<ref>Bob Dylan, quoted in [http://aln2.albumlinernotes.com/Popular_Songbook.html Jeffrey Greenberg, liner notes to ''Alan Lomax: Popular Songbook'', Rounder 82161-1863-2T], on website [http://albumlinernotes.com/Home_Page.html Album Liner Notes.com]</ref> </blockquote>

In 1999 electronica musician [[Moby]] released his fifth album ''[[Play (Moby album)|Play]]''. 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''.<ref name="Christopher Weingarten">{{cite magazine |url=https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/play-10-years-later-mobys-track-by-track-guide-to-1999s-global-smash-20090702 |title="Play" 10 Years Later: Moby's Track by Track Guide to 1999's Global Smash |magazine=Rolling Stone |location=New York |date=July 2, 2009 |access-date=February 1, 2012 |last=Weingarten |first=Christopher R.}}</ref> The album went on to be certified [[Music recording certification|platinum]] in more than 20 countries.<ref name="Roberts">{{cite book |last=Roberts |first=David |year=2006 |title=British Hit Singles & Albums |edition=19th |publisher=Guinness World Records |location=London |isbn=1-904994-10-5 |page=372}}</ref>

In his autobiography ''Chronicles, Part One'', Bob Dylan recollects a 1961 scene: "There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies—French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to go to America, go to Greenwich Village."<ref>{{cite book |last=Dylan |first=Bob |author-link=Bob Dylan |date=2004 |title=Chronicles, Part One |publisher=Simon & Schuster |isbn=07-4323-0760}}</ref>

Lomax is portrayed by actor [[Norbert Leo Butz]] in ''[[A Complete Unknown]]'', the 2024 feature film about Bob Dylan's early career.<ref name="IMDb">{{cite web |title=A Complete Unknown |url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11563598/reference/ |website=IMDb.com  |access-date=25 November 2024}}</ref>