Alan Lomax

Mr. Lomax was born in Austin, Tex., in 1915. He attended Choate and spent a year at Harvard. But in 1933, he left to enroll at the University of Texas, where he graduated in 1936 with a degree in philosophy. Later, he did graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University. He had already become a folk-music collector, recording songs with his father. By the end of the 1930's, John and Alan Lomax had recorded more than 3,000 songs on 78-r.p.m. discs. Generations have grown up with these Library of Congress recordings. During the 1930's, Alan Lomax was on the road regularly, gathering songs across rural America and in the Caribbean. He recorded gospel choirs, Cajun fiddling, country blues, calypsos, New Orleans jazz, Tex-Mex music and Haitian voodoo rituals. The Depression and labor-organizing songs he collected were released in 1967 as ''Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.'' In 1935, he traveled with the writer Zora Neale Hurston and the folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle to collect music from the Georgia Sea Islands and along the Florida coast. Mr. Lomax began a weekly radio program on CBS Radio's ''American School of the Air'' in 1939, and then was given his own network program, ''Back Where I Come From.'' In 1948 he was the host of ''On Top of Old Smokey,'' a radio show on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Mr. Lomax sang alongside Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson during the 1948 presidential campaign of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace. During the McCarthy period, when Mr. Seeger and other left-wing performers were blacklisted because of their political views, Mr. Lomax left the country. He had received a Guggenheim fellowship to study British folk music and lived in England from 1950 to 1957. In the 1980's, Mr. Lomax began work on the Global Jukebox, a database of thousands of songs and dances cross-referenced with anthropological data. With video, text and sound, the Global Jukebox lets users trace cross-cultural connections or seek historical roots. The MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation gave Mr. Lomax grants to create the jukebox, and in 1989 he set up the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College to work on the project. Mr. Lomax is survived by a daughter, Anna L. Chairetakis, and a stepdaughter, Shelley Roitman, both of Holiday, Fla., and a sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, of Northridge, Calif.