Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World

I got a notice from the library that this had come due, and I was going to return it without finishing it, as it's so dense, but just now I was dipping in, and there are so many gems and vignettes, I think I'll renew it and see if I can't read a little more, glean a little more.

...Okay, I did give up on this. Outside of the section on Alan Lomax's friendship with Zora Neale Hurston (which was fascinating), I found the rest of the book too dense with moment-by-moment facts, events, and people; I guess I wanted more of a narrative? Less information? I'm not sure. The things I liked best were the actual quotes from folksongs and descriptions of places he visited.

I got a notice from the library that this had come due, and I was going to return it without finishing it, as it's so dense, but just now I was dipping in, and there are so many gems and vignettes, I think I'll renew it and see if I can't read a little more, glean a little more.

...Okay, I did give up on this. Outside of the section on Alan Lomax's friendship with Zora Neale Hurston (which was fascinating), I found the rest of the book too dense with moment-by-moment facts, events, and people; I guess I wanted more of a narrative? Less information? I'm not sure. The things I liked best were the actual quotes from folksongs and descriptions of places he visited.

An excellent and complete biography of a very important man in the collection of American folk musics, as well as British, Spanish, Italian and other forms of folk music.

John Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. With this background he is not qualified to write a book about music. Furthermore I looked at the list of the other books he's written right here on library thing and he writes he turns out all kinds of books that he obviously doesn't spend time researching. The reason I hated this book was because I bought it because I know a great deal of those songs that have been recorded on various CD collections, the original field recordings. I wanted information about those particular people for which I have known the songs. But this book is something else entirely. It doesn't even explain very well how they traveled show more from place to place their day-to-day life on the road the people they encountered all this information is lost I guess but this was the information that I expected I would find. When I bought this as an Audible book I was naive I was not experienced with how terribly Audible tries to deceive and fraud you with their books. I never would have bought it with a credit. I would have checked it out somewhere else first determined it was a Turkey and just never bought it. Not only this Audible reduced their sound quality. I'm hearing impaired. I'm never gonna buy another Audible ripoff book ever again. show less

Allan Lomax loved to find wonderful music made by (extra)-ordinary people. He opened up many worlds of music for all of us.