External links
- The Association for Cultural Equity
- Lomax Digital Archive
- The Global Jukebox
- Alan Lomax Archive on YouTube
- Anna Lomax Wood at IMDb
- Anna Lomax Wood on Google Scholar
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Anna Lomax Wood is an American anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and public folklorist. She is the president of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), established in 1985 by her father, musicologist Alan Lomax, at Hunter College, CUNY.
Wood was born in New York City on November 20, 1944,. [1] Her mother was Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold, a writer and poet from Blanco, Texas. [2]
Wood served for twenty years as a public folklorist working with Italian immigrants from Northern and Southern Italy and Sicily to produce festivals, concerts, workshops, and music tours. She also worked with Spanish and Greek immigrant artists.
In partnership with producer and attorney Jeffrey Alan Greenberg (1951-2020), [3] Wood produced, compiled, and edited the massive Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records, a scholarly edition of 100-plus CDs of Lomax's recordings in 16 series—Southern Journey; Deep River of Song (including recordings made by John Avery Lomax, Wood's grandfather), The Spanish Recordings, Italian Treasury, Caribbean Voyage, the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (including Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Romania, India, and Yugoslavia), Prison Songs; Portraits (albums dedicated Lomax's recordings of Fred McDowell, Jeannie Robertson, Margaret Barry, Jimmy McBeath, Harry Cox, Texas Gladden, Neville Marcano, Hobart Smith, Davie Stewart, and John Strachan); Classic Louisiana Recordings; Christmas Songs; Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales; Concerts and Radio; and the Songbook series. Rounder Records made it possible for Steve Rosenthal of the Magic Shop to restore and digitize all the audio in the archive. The scholars and specialists who edited and annotated the recordings include David Evans, Kenneth Bilby, Morton Marks, Donald Hill, Kip Lornell, Judith Cohen, Roger Abrahams, Luisa del Giudice, Sandra Tarantino, Sergio Bonanzinga, Goffredo Plastino, Lorna McDaniel, John Cohen, Steven Wade, Maureen Warner Lewis, Barry Jean Ancelet, Peter Kennedy, Margaret Bennet, Ewan McVicar, Adriana Gandolfi, Domenico Di Virgilio, and Mauro Balma.
In 2005, Rounder issued the 8-CD box-set, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings , which included a reissue of Alan Lomax's 1952, book, Mr. Jelly Roll. The set received two Grammy awards: for Best Historical Album (to Anna Lomax Wood and Jeff Greenberg, Executive Producers, and Steve Rosenthal, Sound Engineer) and for Best Album Notes to John Szwed. In 2009, Harte Records issued Alan Lomax in Haiti, a 10-CD box set of Alan Lomax's historic 1936–37 recordings from a trip undertaken for the Library of Congress, re-mastered and restored from the original aluminum discs. [4] The set included original 1937 photographs and film footage by Elizabeth Harold Lomax; liner notes by ethnomusicologist Gage Averill in English, French and Kreyol; transcriptions and translations by Louis Carl St. Jean; and a book with Alan Lomax's Haitian diary, correspondence, and field notes, edited by Ellen Harold. [5] In 2011, it garnered two Grammy nominations: for Best Historical Box Set and Best Album Notes. With the Green Foundation and Gage Averill, Wood explored returning digital copies of the Haiti recordings and films to communities of origin and to the National Archives of Haiti.
In tandem with publication, Wood launched a systematic effort to locate artists and heirs due royalties and fees from publishing and licensing activities.
When her father retired in 1996, Wood took charge of the Association for Cultural Equity to find a home for Lomax's massive archive and bring his most important unfinished projects to fruition. Together with Jeffrey Greenberg, collaborators and staff, including Gideon D'Arcangelo, Matthew Barton, Andrew Kaye, Bertram Lyons, Don Fleming, Kiki Smith-Archiapatti, Richard Smith, Nathan Salsburg, and Ellen Harold, as well as her father's nieces and nephews, John Lomax III, Naomi Hawes Bishop, John Melville Bishop, Corey Denos and Nicholas Hawes, and her son, Odysseus Chairetakis, Wood preserved, digitized and disseminated his archive at Hunter College and depositing the originals at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 2004, which marked the beginning of a close partnership between ACE and the AFC. [6]
Repatriation was an essential aspect Alan Lomax's vision of cultural equity; Wood expanded this in ACE's mission, with a goal of placing cultural resources in the hands of their creators and to support communities in developing them for their benefit. [7] In 2006, with musicologists Samuel Floyd and Rosita Sands of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College, Chicago, Wood launched an extensive initiative to return Lomax's recordings, photographs and documents to the Caribbean. This grew into ACE's Repatriation Program which, in 2020, reached over 50 country, regional, and community libraries and local repositories in the U.S., the Caribbean, Britain and Ireland, Spain, and Italy engaging and collaborating with local communities in curating, renewing their traditions. [8]
Wood and ACE staff created a free online archive of all Lomax's media collections annotated by an area specialist. On January 30, 2012, The New York Times reported that the Association for Cultural Equity was making publicly available Alan Lomax's entire archive of post-1942 recordings, films, and photos for streaming on the World Wide Web [9] through the newly launched Alan Lomax Archive [10] and a YouTube channel of video clips depicting regional American folk songs and folklife (digitized with a Save America's Treasures grant) curated by Nathan Salsburg. [11] As of Feb 25, 2021, it has reached nearly 28 million views and 84,000 subscribers.
Wood developed the Endangered Cultures Initiative at ACE, proposing complete recorded surveys of the expressive traditions of a community to be carried out by a community member, with the resulting documentation belonging to the community. [12] ACE supports, trains and mentors an emerging leader from an unrecorded culture to document the full range of expressive arts in his community and to prepare the results for archiving, viewing, research, and ready access. The community owns the physical recordings and intellectual property, and may choose or not to deposit copies in world and regional libraries. The pilot project involved Dominic (Donato) Raimondo, a South Sudanese Didinga and former "Lost Boy", [13] documenting and cataloging his tribe's music, dance, and storytelling at Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya, and returning to discuss the significance, care, and uses of this documentation with elders, youth, and other. [14] Lamont Jack Pearly, an African American blues singer, scholar and online media host, is documenting the disappearing African American storefront church. [15]
The Global Jukebox is a web application that maps world song, dance and speech against strategies of human adaptation. It is a freely accessible, annotated source for curated examples of performance traditions from throughout the world [16] including nearly 6000 examples of traditional and indigenous music. It began as a prototype created by Alan Lomax and Michael del Rio in the 1990s, based on comprehensive comparative research on performing arts carried out from 1960 to 1993 by Lomax, Conrad Arensberg, Victor Grauer, Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay, and Norman Markel and others. [17]
In 2017, Wood, together with media architect Gideon D'Arcangelo, developer John Szinger and a team of researchers and designers, redesigned and updated the concept and brought the Global Jukebox to the web.
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Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted orally, music with unknown composers, music that is played on traditional instruments, music about cultural or national identity, music that changes between generations, music associated with a people's folklore, or music performed by custom over a long period of time. It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles. The term originated in the 19th century, but folk music extends beyond that.
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lomax Hawes, also distinguished collectors of folk music.
Folklore studies is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde (German), folkeminner (Norwegian), and folkminnen (Swedish), among others.
Cantometrics is a method developed by Alan Lomax and a team of researchers for relating elements of the world's traditional vocal music to features of social organization as defined via George Murdock's Human Relations Area Files, resulting in a taxonomy of expressive human communications style. Lomax defined Cantometrics as the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and maintained that Cantometrics reveals folk performance style to be a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. His work on Cantometrics gave rise to further comparative studies of aspects of human communication in relation to culture, including: Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics, and Minutage.
The Archive of Folk Culture was established in 1928 as the first national collection of American folk music in the United States of America. It was initially part of the Music Division of the Library of Congress and now resides in the American Folklife Center.
Alan Jabbour was an American musician and folklorist, and the founding director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music. The center and its collections have grown to encompass all aspects of folklore and folklife worldwide.
Benjamin Albert Botkin was an American folklorist and scholar.
Public folklore is the term for the work done by folklorists in public settings in the United States and Canada outside of universities and colleges, such as arts councils, museums, folklife festivals, radio stations, etc., as opposed to academic folklore, which is done within universities and colleges. The term is short for "public sector folklore" and was first used by members of the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s.
Mary Elizabeth Jones was an American gospel and folk singer credited with helping to bring folk songs, games and stories to wider audiences in the 20th century. Alan Lomax, who first encountered Jones on a field recording trip in 1959, said, "She was on fire to teach America. In my heart, I call her the Mother Courage of American Black traditions."
Margaret Anne "Peggy" Bulger is a folklorist and served as the director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999 to 2011, when she moved to Florida to continue work on personal projects.
"Rock Island Line" is an American folk song. Ostensibly about the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, it appeared as a folk song as early as 1929. The first recorded performance of "Rock Island Line" was by inmates of the Arkansas Cummins State Farm prison in 1934.
Bess Lomax Hawes was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax and John Lomax Jr.
The Center for Traditional Music and Dance (CTMD) is a leading folk/traditional arts organization based in New York City. Originally established as the Balkan Arts Center in 1968, CTMD assists the city's ethnic and immigrant communities in maintaining their traditions and cultural heritage. CTMD has developed a range of programs that emphasize research, documentation, collaboration, presentation, and education to help advance its mission of cultural equity. Over the past five decades, CTMD’s programs have led to the creation of nationally renowned ensembles, folk arts festivals, and community-based cultural organizations. CTMD provides the public with a full calendar of events designed to showcase and promote the diversity of New York City's performing arts traditions.
Olga Wilhelmine Munding is an American New Orleans-based blues musician, producer and actress.
Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985) was an American anthropologist and pioneer ethnomusicologist. Her work included the study of the origins and development of music among the Jamaican Maroons, and the Puebloan peoples of the American southwest. Her recordings of ancient Hawaiian meles are archived at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Roberts was a protege of Alfred V. Kidder and Franz Boas.
Eloise Hubbard Linscott was a 20th-century American folklorist, song collector, and preservationist. She is the author of Folk Songs of Old New England (1939), considered a valuable scholarly source for American folk songs. John Lee Brooks described Folk Songs of Old New England as an American equivalent of Bishop Percy's 1765 work Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
The Southern Journey is the popular name given to a field-recording trip around the Southern States of the US by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. He was accompanied on the trip by his then-lover, English folk singer Shirley Collins. It resulted in the first stereo field-recordings in the Southern United States and the "discovery" of Mississippi Fred McDowell. The music collected on the trip has had a significant impact on the development of popular music. Tracks recorded on the trip were sampled by Moby for his album, Play. It also served as the inspiration for the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' film, O Brother Where Art Thou. The Southern Journey is the subject of an autobiography by Shirley Collins entitled America Over the Water. It is also the subject of s 2017 feature documentary, The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Lomax's own recollections of the trip were documented in his autobiography, The Land Where Blues Began, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1993.
Elizabeth Lyttleton Sturz was an American poet, writer, folklorist, and social worker. With Alan Lomax, she recorded and interviewed musicians across America, and was later the founder and Director of the South Bronx's Argus Community.
