Alan Lomax, Photo by Shirley Colins, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In addition to his many published books and essays, Lomax was a prolific letter writer, kept copious field notes, and produced detailed grant proposals and reports. Szwed draws on this trove of primary source material to weave an engaging narrative of Lomax's life and accomplishments. The Depression years saw young Lomax drop out of Harvard, complete a BA at the University of Texas, sojourn through the South collecting folk music with his father, the renowned "ballad hunter" John Lomax, and work for the Library of Congress where he helped to organize the Archive of American Folk Song. During World War II he relocated to New York, eking out a living as an independent radio host, record producer, writer, concert organizer, and occasional manager of folk singers Woody Guthrie and Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. His self-imposed exile in Europe during the heated McCarthy years broadened his interests in world music, fostering numerous recording, radio, and television projects. Following his return to the States in 1958, Lomax dove into the burgeoning folk music revival, and spent decades raising money to further his comparative world folk-song-style research (dubbed cantometrics) and related audio and fi lm documentaries until a stroke fi nally slowed him down in 1995. When he passed away in 2002, he left behind a dozen monographs and folk song collections; numerous scholarly and popular articles; hundreds of audio recordings; scores of radio, TV, and fi lm programs; and a collection of thousands of hours of audio/visual recordings and photographs now housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. He did not quite, as the book's subtitle suggests, record the whole world (he never reached Africa or Asia), but his collections of traditional southern U.S., Caribbean, and European musics are unparalleled, and his attempts to synthesize folk music styles from every corner of the globe unprecedented.

Lomax's contributions to the fields of folk music studies and ethnomusicology run deep. He and his father were the fi rst folk music scholars to bring serious attention to the contributions of southern African Americans at a time when the field was dominated by the study of British and Anglo-American balladry. He helped spur the midcentury transition of folk song scholarship from a literary endeavor, based on the comparison of lyrical texts (and occasionally their melodic counterparts) to the ethnographic study of musical performances situated in specific social and historical settings. The tape recorder replaced the pen and paper as the primary instrument used in capturing the lyrics and melody, as well as the more subtle elements of timbre, texture, dynamics, rhythmic phrasing, and vocal delivery of folk music performance. For Lomax, sound and social structure were indelibly intertwined, and the systematic study of a community's folk music style offered a window to their social and personal relations.

Despite Lomax's dazzling accomplishments he was not without his detractors. Academics were skeptical of his provocative scholarship that sought to combine methods of musicology, anthropology, literature, sociology, philosophy, and psychology at a time when such interdisciplinary thinking was not in fashion. Not surprisingly, literary scholars found his work too analytical, while social scientists dismissed it as romantic and soft. Lomax remained deeply defensive about his work and resentful toward those academics who failed to take his theories seriously.

Lomax is portrayed as brilliant but irascible, a man of prodigious intellect and ego who was quick to dismiss his critics and ride roughshod over anyone who got in his way. Over the years Lomax was accused of patronizing and bullying his informants, copywriting their songs, alienating colleagues, and failing to collaborate with local researchers on his various collecting trips. Szwed remains even-handed when addressing these and other controversies that swirled around Lomax's career. The question of dubious copyright and royalty distribution practices, for example, is handled in a broader discussion of the inherent problems of recording and copyrighting folk songs. The ethical complexities involved become apparent when Szwed recounts the story of royalty distributions resulting from the hefty sales of pop recordings of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene," a song originally published and copyrighted in 1936 as part of the Lomaxes' collection, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (Macmillan). Lomax maintained that as the song collector he was due a share of the royalties, but when he finally received $3,000 he poured the money back into support for his next fi eld research project.

Szwed resists the temptation to cheerlead for his subject, but occasionally glosses over criticisms that warrant commentary. While acknowledging that Lomax's 1993 memoir, Land Where the Blues Began (Free Press), received mixed reviews, he inexplicably fails to address the much ballyhooed accusations of researchers Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. In their 2005 volume, Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University—Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (Vanderbilt University Press), the editors disparage Lomax's memoir as a "static and nostalgic portrayal" of southern black culture and accuse him of hijacking the Fisk project while denying proper credit to black folklorist John Work. Gordon and Nemerov's book received considerable press attention, rattling, posthumously, old skeletons that had haunted Lomax throughout his career.

Szwed reveals that for all his bluster, Lomax was a troubled individual. For much of his early career he felt overshadowed by his father, and not until the senior Lomax's death in 1948 and Alan's time in Europe did the latter begin to feel he was becoming his own man. Apparently he never fully recovered from the emotional trauma of his divorce from his first wife Elizabeth Harold Goodman Lomax. He struggled to maintain a fatherly relationship with his only daughter Anna, who in later years would assist with his projects and oversee the Lomax collection. Money was always an issue—without the luxury of a permanent academic or government position, Lomax was forced to spend his entire career hustling to support his research projects. He lived hand-to-mouth, worked in small crowded spaces, and often found himself in debt. Despite the accolades his books and recordings received, he remained bitter that the academic world was not more receptive to his work and willing to grant him a faculty position with a steady salary and support for his research (his larger grants were administered initially through Columbia University and later through Hunter College, where he was given office space, but never a faculty line).

Fitting the life and works of this extraordinary individual between the covers of a single volume was no easy task, which perhaps explains why the biography ends somewhat abruptly, dealing only nominally with the Lomax legacy which will be indelibly shaped by the sale of his collection to the Library of Congress and the ongoing efforts of Rounder Records to bring out the remainder of his recordings. Brief as it is, Szwed's final chapter underscores Lomax's exceptional ability to think outside the box in harnessing the latest technological innovations. By the late 1980s, realizing the potential power of the personal computer to store and deliver digital information, he proposed the global jukebox, an interactive, multimedia database that would allow users to hear and see the music of the world. Well over a decade before anyone had even dreamed of internet fi le sharing or streaming/downloading services, Lomax envisioned thepossibility of instantaneous access to the world's music and dance traditions. The global jukebox never came to fruition, but certainly exemplifies the far-reaching, creative thinking that made him one of the greatest innovators of his time.

Of course, The Man Who Recorded the World will not be the final word on the twentieth-century's most influential folk music specialist. Ronald Cohen's recently published collection, Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935– 1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), is one of a number of critical works that promise to further elucidate the Lomax legacy. At present, Szwed has provided us with the authoritative biography of Alan Lomax and an invaluable contribution to our understanding of folk music in the modern world.

—R.A.