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His interest in Pete Seeger and folk music dates back to the Folk Revival of the 1960s, when he learned to play the banjo one summer using Pete Seeger’s How to Play The Five-String Banjo instruction manual. Born January 31, 1915, in Austin, Texas, he was the son of John Avery Lomax. Tim Holt has been performing music programs in West Coast venues for a number of years. If ever a man was born into the field of folklore and musicology, it was Lomax.
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They recorded work songs sung by prison inmates, cowboys singing in bars, hill folk singing and plucking on their banjos, the authentic sounds of American folk culture as it emerged in songs like “Cindy,” “John Henry,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Midnight Special,” and “Home On The Range.” Join Tim Holt in this celebration and singalong of American roots music. They lugged their primitive, heavy recording equipment up hills and over creek beds in a quest for American roots music in remote outposts free from mainstream commercial influences. He was soon joined by his son Alan in a wide-ranging search for authentic American folk songs that included the Appalachian region and southern prisons. John and Alan Lomax / Various Artists Lost Train Blues: John & Alan Lomax and the Early Folk Music Collections at the Library of Congress, released 1.
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Inspired by those early boyhood memories, John Lomax would later roam all over Texas recording cowboy songs for the Library of Congress. John Szwed is the author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis and Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra, among other works. It started with a boy growing up along the old Chisholm Trail in Texas and hearing the cowboys singing and yodeling to their cattle. Join Tim Holt in this celebration and singalong of American roots music. The American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, home to the magnificent field recordings collected by John and Alan Lomax during their tenure. The work of John and Alan Lomax has been pivotal in understanding the history of the blues and its Black cultural offshoots and antecedents.