Alan Lomax Quotes

“And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.”

— Alan Lomax

“The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.”

— Alan Lomax

“He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.”

— Alan Lomax

“I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.”

— Alan Lomax

“You could hear him, literally, half a mile away when he opened up. He was at his peak then. He was, naturally, dying to get out of the place he was in, and he recorded for us his appeal for pardon to the governor.”

— Alan Lomax

“The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.”

— Alan Lomax

“The essence of America lies not in the headlined heroes ... but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies”

— Alan Lomax

“We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.”

— Alan Lomax

“People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.”

— Alan Lomax

The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind.

— Alan Lomax

Folk Music is the map of singing.

— Alan Lomax