Lomax's father, John Lomax, was a noted collector of folk songs, a self-described "ballad hunter" who helped to create the Library of Congress' Archive of the American Folk Song by going into the field with a recorder in the early 1930s to document folk music, particularly the songs of poor African-Americans in the south. On such a trip, he recorded a Louisiana prisoner named Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. John Lomax took his son Alan on many of these trips, despite Alan being only 18 years old when John Lomax mounted his first expedition.
In 1934, Alan and John visited Lead Belly in prison again, and when he was released from prison later that year (legend has it that a song that they recorded for Lead Belly and played for the governor secured his release, but in reality he was released for time served and because of the budget crunch brought on by the Great Depression) they hired Lead Belly to serve as their driver and assistant while they were touring the south for songs.
In 1937, Alan became the Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, and began in earnest his remarkable career of documenting folk songs and, perhaps just as importantly, introducing them to a wider audience. Besides documenting the music, Alan Lomax also collected oral histories, recording interviews with figures such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton. He hosted a radio show called Your Ballad Man, which played a wide variety of traditional and folk music from 1945-1949. In the 1950s, Alan Lomax edited the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an 18 volume collection.
In 1959, in the midst the Folk Revival that his pioneering work helped lay the groundwork for, Lomax staged the Folksong '59 concert in Carnegie Hall, featuring gospel, bluegrass, folk, rock and roll and blues music, some of these genres making their first appearances at the famed concert hall.
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