Alan Lomax Field Recordings and Early Ethnomusicology

Lomax's Work as it is Preserved Across Platforms

The nature of an ethnomusicologist's work inherently involves the recording and analysis of sound. This was certainly true for Lomax, who prolifically recorded many artists in attempt to capture various folksongs, cultures, and histories of music. Yet Lomax also produced an invaluable amount of still images, manuscript materials, and video recordings. These various materials can be parsed and displayed in innumerable ways, though we decided on a select number of themes (assigned to your on your handout) to act as a guiding point for our "exhibition" of Lomax. 

Here is an example of a page that takes a theme or specific criteria — in this case, the concept of  Sacred Harp Singing — to help organize the Lomax materials in a meaningful, precise way. 

A bare-bones page of such materials might look something like the one we provide below. Of course, Scalar offers a multitude of other possible layouts (available under the "Layout" tab) and even allows users to use custom CSS or Javascript to customize their pages as they see fit. 

So, if our topic is Sacred Harp singing, we could start with an early example of this style, recorded by Lomax in 1942 and pulled from the LoC website (we found it by performing a basic search of the term on their site): We could give another example of what this music sounds like by turning to Youtube recordings that aren't hosted on LoC but were still created by Lomax: 
Then, we could show a manuscript, written by Lomax, in which he talks about his desire to put out an album of such recordings: Finally, we could show users how the tradition of Sacred Harp singing continues to be practiced in a contemporary setting. Is there an argument we could make about how this "once dying" tradition was successfully preserved by Lomax, as evidenced by new practitioners? 

If our next section of the book had to do with Lomax's Canton, Mississippi recordings, we could add a "Path" to lead our reader there next. To do so, we just need to be in the Editing mode, select "Relationships" and indicate that page as 'up next':

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page references: