Hi Rick,

Alan told me that he was "persona non grata" where he lived in Lubbock Texas. He was alienated from his father John who disapproved of Alan's efforts at promoting Leadbelly. Alan was outspoken as a proponent of Civil Rights for African-Americans. His mission was to bring forth the best performances he could from the people he recorded. This might be interpreted as being "condescending" by some but Alan had to pay the bills for doing his job.

Alan was a warm-hearted passionate man who loved folk music and the people who played it. He was so happy that Hobart Smith could sit down and play blues with (I think it was) Mississippi John Hurt knowing that Hobart used that awful term.

When I went to visit his apartment in New York near MacDougal Street he sat in the middle of walls of collected tapes. He looked around and said to me, "This is all I have to show for my life, these tapes."
He fought uphill battles to get this music recorded, heard and appreciated.

His sister Bess Lomax Hawes is still with us and is as important in my view as Alan was. She instituted the first folk music ensemble class that I ever heard of first in Boston, and then in Santa Monica, California. It was her method of teaching that influenced me and the basis for the beginnings of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. She went on to receive her degree in anthropology and to galvanize the folk arts division of the Library of Congress funding research projects and folk musicians. She wrote the book "Step It Down" which tells of the songs and dances of Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers.

The Lomaxes may have put folk music on the map. First, John Sr. at Harvard attempting to persuade Lyman Kittredge in the English Department that Cowboy Songs from the tradition had value and should be treated seriously. Alan, who promoted Leadbelly, Woody and Pete in the early days and was an outspoken defender of the rights of black people in America. Alan was passionate, sometimes to a fault when he would have a few too many down at the Village Gate in New York and yell at Bud and Travis for commercializing folk music. He didn't like the fact that I was singing a version of "All My Trials" with a jazzy arrangement. But he was a great lover of jazz as the wonderful interviews with Jelly Roll Morton for the Library of Congress attests.

There was also the publicized wrestling match with Al Grossman, the impresario over the electrified Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Festival. I didn't see that but Alan's passion for folk music was well-known and Grossman represented a kind of commercialism that Alan would have found distateful.

He left a lot in his wake. Some might have found imperfections in his manner of handling people but there was a great pressure on him at that time in doing the work that he did because he didn't really get a lot of support for it in the early days. He has been criticized for his "copyrights" but they were used to finance his various projects and I never remember him as being especially wealthy as many who became "folk stars" in the popular music field and owed their livelihoods to his trail blazing efforts. Alan created a wealth for our country, though. He helped define our history.

Frank