July 20, 2002

The Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition is deeply saddened to have lost musicologist Alan Lomax this week. He was 87 years old. His life's work and philosophy inspired our Coalition and we were deeply appreciative for the powerful letter he wrote, while ill, on our behalf <http://www.openair.org/maxwell/plomax.html>.

Maxwell Street was a historic place of working class culture, Blues creativity, and folk traditions. It is ironic that our fight to save it was against a major public institution of higher learning whose faculty and students were not at all receptive to arguments such as those from Alan Lomax. We hope the future will listen more to Alan Lomax and therefore be wiser, showing concern and respect for its indigenous and authentic folk cultures and a willingness to bestow value on it, maybe even a greater value than for parking lots, ball fields, and condos. -- Steve Balkin, Vice President of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition.

The New York Times has a very good obituary article about him by Jon Pereles on the front page in its July 20, 2002 issue <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/obituaries/20LOMA.html>. Below are some excerpts:

• In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called "cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom."

• Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. "It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom," he once said.

• "The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them," Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, "were just as good as anybody else."

• "The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances," Mr. Lomax recalled. "There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce."

• To the end, he remained a vigorous defender of the old ways. He may have appreciated gospel music, for example, but he was also quick to point out the loss of the improvised spiritual harmonies it displaced.

• "We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him," Mr. Lomax once reflected. "Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency."

For more information about Maxwell Street see <http://www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html> and <http://www.maxwellstreet.org>.

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