A friend recently passed along the following. I am not acquainted with the author, but I find myself agreeing more than not. I have heard a couple of stories of Lomax's behavior at Newport -- standing up two somewhat mystified Mississippi Delta bluesman in front of a largely white audience and instructing them to conduct a "carving session", for instance -- that have more than a tinge of paternalism, not to say racism, about them.

MR. BIG STUFF Dave Marsh

Seeing Alan Lomax's obituary on the front page of the New York Times irked the hell out of me. Harry Smith syndrome all over again-the Great White "Discoverer" as the axis of cultural genesis. Lomax, wrote Jon Pareles, "advocated what he called 'cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.'"

He did?

In 1993, when Lomax published The Land Where the Blues Began, his memoir of blues research in the deep South, Peter Bochan invited him to do a WBAI interview. Bochan ventured to Lomax that Elvis Presley stood as a great product of the Southern folk cultures. Lomax firmly denied this, and said that Bochan couldn't even know that Presley had listened as a boy to Sister Rosetta Tharpe's gospel radio show because "You weren't there." He said this so persistently and adamantly-with all the stupid "folklorist" purism that ruined the folk music revival-that Bochan went home and intercut Lomax's prissy voice and dumb assertions with excerpts from Beavis and Butthead. It aired that way.

Even sticking to the blues, Lomax cut a dubious figure. As a veteran blues observer wrote me, "Don't get too caught up in grieving for Alan Lomax. For every fine musical contribution that he made, there was an evil venal manipulation of copyright, publishing and ownership of the collected material."

The most notorious concerns "Goodnight Irene." Lomax and his father recorded Leadbelly's song first, so when the song needed to be formally copyrighted because the Weavers were about to have a huge hit with it, representatives of the Ledbetter family approached him. Lomax agreed that this copyright should be established. He adamantly refused to take his name off the song, or to surrender income from it, even though Leadbelly's family was impoverished in the wake of his death two years earlier.

Lomax believed folk culture needed guidance from superior beings like himself. Lomax told Bochan what he believed; nothing in poor people's culture truly happened unless someone like him documented it. He hated rock'n'roll-down to instigating the assault against Bob Dylan's sound system at Newport in '65-because it had no need of ediation by experts like himself.

The nature of the expert mattered, too. Lomax's obit made the front page mainly because he "discovered" Son House and Muddy Waters. But in "Can't Be Satisfied", his new Muddy Waters biography, Gordon shows that Lomax's discoveries weren't the serendipitous events the great white hunter portrayed. Lomax was led to House and then Waters by the great Negro scholar, John Work III of Fisk University. Gordon even shows Lomax plagiarizing Work, and not on a minor point. (See page 51) In his book, Lomax offers precisely one sentence about Work. He eliminated Work from his second Mississippi trip. He also burned Muddy Waters for the $20 he promised for making the records.

Maybe the fact that Lomax served as a folk music "missionary" (to use Bob Dylan's term) offsets all this. Provided that it doesn't turn out that Lomax used and discarded ethnic workers worldwide the way he used Work, I guess there's a case to be made. But I do hope that people understand that when Pareles says that "Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars," part of the meaning is that he didn't want them to get in the way of his self-importance.

Sometime soon, we need to figure out why it is that, when it comes to cultures like those of Mississippi black people, we celebrate the milkman more than the milk. Meanwhile, every sentence that will be uttered about Lomax this week-including these-would be better used to describe the great musicians he recorded in the U.S., the Bahamas, and elsewhere. Reading Gordon's book serves as a good corrective.