Ms. Azizi looked in on the Alan Lomax Archive going online thread to say, "I consider it to be very troubling that Alan Lomax never credited John W. Work III, his African American partner and guide in the collection of Delta Blues in the early 1940s."

John W. Work, III, was a composer, educator, choral director, and ethnomusicologist who taught at Fisk University.

She's got a post on her cultural blog, Pancocojams, that has a good introduction and link to several other articles: Remembering & Honoring John Wesley Work III.

There is a now a John W. Work III Memorial Foundation, formed to:

- Assist in the preservation, protection, and promotion of all manuscripts and/or works, both published and unpublished of the late composer, John W. Work, III;
-   Memorialize and preserve the memory of John W. Work, III;
-   Promote research and training in black musicology; and
-   Present awards and scholarships to worthy musicologists, composers, performers, and/or students for the purpose of futhering their labors in the field of musicology, composition, and or performance especially African Americans in the field of music.

Work's book, American Negro Songs and Spirituals (1960) is often cited as a source here at Mudcat.

In 2011, he was inducted into The Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame. They describe "noted African American educator, John W. Work, III whose ground-breaking work in the blues was not appreciated until long after his death".

Azizi links a review of the 2010 biography Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, by John Szwed, in the Guardian about this missing inforamtion:

More damning still is the more recent discovery that Lomax appropriated research done by the likes of the black scholar John W Work, who was his conduit to pioneering blues artists like Muddy Waters and Son House. "Sometime soon," Marsh [described earlier as "the combative American music critic"] concluded, "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."

(I posted the full text of the Guardian article here in the Mudcat thread on the biography.)

More light, I say.

~ Becky in Tucson