Alan Lomax Quotes

#1. Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.

Pete Seeger

#2. I was working for Alan Lomax in the Library of Congress folk song archive, and starting to realize what a wealth of different kinds of music there was in this country that you never heard on the radio.

Pete Seeger

#3. I learned by transcribing songs out of the Library of Congress collection in Washington where I was working. I got a job when I just turned twenty in 1939 and Alan [Lomax] needed some help. I listened to hundreds of records every week.

Pete Seeger

#4. Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular."

Pete Seeger

#5. Make the kind of music you love even if you never hear it on the air. This was the basic lesson I'd gotten from Alan [Lomax]. Alan said, Pete, look at all this great music around. You never hear it on the radio, but it's right there, great music.

Pete Seeger

#6. The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind.

Alan Lomax

#7. Folk Music is the map of singing.

Alan Lomax

#8. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Alan Lomax

#9. As you meditate and become more spiritually attuned, you can better discern and recognize the sound of your higher self or the voice of God speaking to you through words, images, and sensations.

Jack Canfield

#10. And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.

Alan Lomax

#11. Every woman has a mother, and every woman will have an issue with that mother and things that mother did or didn't do. It just depends on how you choose to process the lessons that you learned from your own mother.

Kate Winslet

#12. Americans have powerfully sensed that we're off track. There is a structural challenge in our economy that needs to be addressed.

Jeff Merkley

#13. The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.

Alan Lomax

#14. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.

Richard Flanagan

#15. I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.

Alan Lomax

#16. He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.

Alan Lomax

#17. You could hear him, literally, half a mile away when he opened up. He was at his peak then. He was, naturally, dying to get out of the place he was in, and he recorded for us his appeal for pardon to the governor.

Alan Lomax

#18. We have been sold a lifestyle, when what our soul desired was life.

Oriah Dreamer

#19. The essence of America lies not in the headlined heroes ... but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies

Alan Lomax

#20. English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.

Alan Lomax