Lomax, John

Lomax, John

(born Sept. 23, 1867, Goodman, Miss., U.S.—died Jan. 26, 1948, Greenville, Miss.) U.S. ethnomusicologist. He attended Harvard University and soon thereafter began publishing collections of cowboy songs. In the 1930s he and his teenage son Alan (1915–2002) collected folk songs of the Southwest and Midwest. Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, and Muddy Waters were perhaps the most significant of their many important discoveries; the Lomaxes' archive of Morton's performance and storytelling was of particular significance. Both men did important work at the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Music. Their many books and anthologies spurred the folk music revival of the 1950s and '60s.