"...Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in
the South, Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United
States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and
much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music
stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the
folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that
shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond...... Long before the Internet existed, he envisioned a “global jukebox” to disseminate and analyze the material he had gathered during decades of fieldwork. A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads. ..."
See article in The New York Times: Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital.
Further news about this Global Jukebox see news at Cultural Equity.
Thanks to Johan Jacobsson.
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