“The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind,” he said in a 1991 interview with CBS. He began work on a “global jukebox” to store thousands of songs and dances, cross-referenced with anthropological data. Lomax envisioned this sort of database as computer technology progressed in the 1980s. The earliest recordings were made by John and Alan Lomax in Harlan County in 1933.

The wide-ranging samples were digitized from hard copies at the Library of Congress and include 1978 field recordings from the Kullu culture in Himachal Pradesh, India harvest songs from 1954 Romania and a ballad to John Henry from Asheville, N.C., in 1941, recorded by Lomax. These are documentary sound recordings of rural Kentucky music and lore made for the Library of Congress by John Lomax and his son Alan together and separately over about a four year period in the 1930s and early 1940s. The website, organized by map and by culture, is free to use. The project, an interactive website, allows users to listen to and learn about more than 6,000 songs from 1,000 cultures - including many from Lomax’s personal collection.

Lomax died in 2002, but the organization he founded, the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), is hoping to further his research with the Global Jukebox, a new online database.

He also created systems to classify this music and explore the links between cultures. He spent decades in the field, recording heralded artists like Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, as well as far more obscure musicians, from the British Isles to Haiti. In 1952 Folkways Records released a set of very strange, very powerful old recordings under the title Anthology of American Folk Music. Alan Lomax made it his lifelong mission to archive and share traditional music from around the world.

Alan lomax recordings