We have "never credited" twice in this thread, and it was false both times.

Alan Lomax was very much about himself. The suggestion that he treated black scholars ungenerously relative to himself is artificial, misleading, and unfair, because he treated other scholars _generally_ ungenerously relative to himself.

"'To me, Work is important because he's an academic who sees the value of homegrown, vernacular material,' Mr. Gordon said. 'Most academics were ashamed of that." Considering that Alan Lomax was very, very interested in homegrown, vernacular material, and Work less so, this promotion for a particular book is rather phony.

"'Work's transcriptions show us that Mississippi wasn't only about the blues,'" Huh?? Alan Lomax recorded lots of non-blues in Mississippi in 1941-1942 and wrote about it.

"Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding." A. Lomax's interest in documenting folk for the Archive of American Folk Song was because it was the Archive Of American Folk Song.

"There's nascent boogie-woogie in that music" Nascent -- gee, I thought George W. Thomas was playing boogie-woogie back in 1912, e.g.

"[T]he Lomaxes gave America a very peculiar view of black music." Absolute baloney. As we've discussed on mudcat before, there was a commercial record industry documenting what was in vogue in 1941-1942. That did not need to be documented by fieldworkers, there were dozens of commercial record labels. Pretending that the people who were interesting in documenting folk music before it died were failing to document the kind of music the commercial record companies were documenting anyway, music "as it was unfolding," "the black culture of the time," is a ridiculous supposed point, no matter who brings it up.

"they were interested in preserving music that wasn't going to be around in 10 years' time." Right. "You can't fault them for that...." Right. So don't.