Lomax Collection

John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax were among the most consequential field collectors of American folk music in the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s, they traveled the rural South with recording equipment — visiting prisons, churches, and remote communities where older forms of the music survived largely intact — and captured thousands of recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

The Lomax collection brought spirituals and work songs to audiences who had never encountered them in their original contexts. Their recordings captured not just the melodies but the social settings in which the music lived: the call-and-response of prison work gangs, the improvised verses of church services, the communal singing of field labor.

The Lomax collection is not without its complications. John and Alan Lomax were white men recording Black musicians at a time when the power dynamics of that relationship were rarely examined. Scholars have since raised important questions about attribution, compensation, and the colonial dimensions of folk-song collecting. This archive presents Lomax's documentation as a historical resource while acknowledging that the tradition it captured belongs to the communities who created it — not to its collectors.