Daniel Matlin
Folk Hero
The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax
By John Szwed
William Heinemann 410pp £20 order from our bookshop
When the two Voyager probes were launched in 1977 on an interstellar journey projected to last for a billion years, each was fitted with a gold-plated copper disc containing ninety minutes of music from planet Earth. Should extraterrestrial beings ever have the desire and capability to listen to these discs, half of the tracks they hear will be selections made by one man. Thanks to Alan Lomax, works by Bach, Mozart and Stravinsky are complemented by recordings of folk music from the Solomon Islands, Peru, Java, Japan, Australia, India and Bulgaria, as well as by numbers performed by Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson. As Lomax’s biographer John Szwed observes, it remains ‘the ultimate mix tape’.
Merely reading Alan Lomax’s life is so exhausting that the notion of someone actually living it seems implausible. His primary occupation as an itinerant folklorist (‘Road Scholar’, in Szwed’s apt phrase) meant that much of his fifty-year career was spent tearing across the United States in a succession
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings
'If, as James Wolcott once claimed, Roth was a miracle of modern medicine, he was also one of therapy’s notable failures.'
@leorobsonwriter on Philip Roth, that 'walking, wanking paradox'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist