There is no single non-musician with a greater impact on modern music than Alan Lomax.

Alright, he was a musician, but creating music was not his passion, and certainly not what he’s remembered for. His passion was the connection between music and culture, and his calling was to preserve the folk music created by cultures around the world, particularly in the US.

Throughout the mid-20th Century, Lomax collected and recorded music that might otherwise have been lost to the emerging American-driven pop music monoculture. His (literally) thousands of hours of recordings not only captured and preserved folk music of the early 1900s, but helped lead to a resurgence of interest in folk music during the 1950s and 1960s. Without him, it’s quite possible that blues and folk legends Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly and Muddy Waters would never have found an audience.

But his effect on the course of music doesn’t end with folk music.

His field recordings, available through the Library of Congress, have been sampled by generations of electronic and hip hop artists since the 1990s. Most famously, Moby used the Lomax recordings as the source material for his landmark 1999 album Play. Which is how a sample from Lomax’s library ended up on week one of this blog.

The Lomax recordings are useable as foundations for sample-based music for a few reasons. First, they often contain isolated elements; a capella vocals, a guitar by itself, organic-sounding hand claps and foot stomps. They were also often done on portable equipment, cutting-edge in the 1940s but relatively low-quality, which lends them a grainy vintage vibe.

But mostly, I think it’s the emotion. Folk music is often – let’s face it – the music of oppressed peoples. Music of struggles felt not by some sulky privileged kid in his bedroom who’s angry about his early bedtime, but by a group of people pushing up from beneath a heavy weight.

Is it a sad irony that a white male academic became more celebrated for his recordings of folk music than the subjects of his recordings became for singing it? Yes, sure. But Lomax wasn’t some scholarly member of the 1%, and was himself followed closely by the FBI for decades because he was suspected of having communist sympathies.

Alan Lomax was a lifelong proponent of multiculturalism in the sense that he feared globalization would dilute the thousands of nuanced cultures around the world. This drove him to capture those cultures wherever they were.

When it came time to send the Voyager space probe out into the great emptiness outside our solar system, someone had to choose which music would be included to represent humanity to whichever alien hands might eventually find it. That responsibility fell to Alan Lomax, and I can’t think of anyone more fitting.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The main vocal sample. The singer is Florence Stamp, and the recording is from Lomax’s library. The metronomic claps and the repeated message of “I’ve never been satisfied” gives the song a sense of unfulfilled purpose. Catching Flies has done a wonderful job here of recontextualizing the sample while preserving its emotion.

2. Not sure if it’s a harp or a Japanese Koto, but the plucked stringed instrument that rises and falls throughout has the effect of untethering the song from the clear American-ness of the central sample.

3. The hyper-reverbed piano giving the impression of infinite space, like we’ve just zoomed out from the time and place of the Lomax recordings, and are now looking down at humanity from a distance.

Recommended listening activity:

Drafting a message that you might one day put in a bottle.

Buy it here.

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