Movies: Alan Lomax

A young Venezuelan idealist flees his native land to escape a revolution. Hoping to find peace, he goes to the mountains and the forests of the Amazon. There he encounters Rima, the Bird Girl, an orphan living a life of nature, who is feared by a loc...

Every American who has listened to the radio knows Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land." The music of the folk singer/songwriter has been recorded by everyone from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to U2. Originally blowing out of the Dust Bowl in Depression...

1990 BBCTV documentary on the life of the late celebrated folk singer, playwright and political activist...

Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, sing...

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was a song collector who recorded ordinary people, who gave their heart and soul in front of his microphone. The film maker decides to search for people Lomax recorded, travelling through Europe in an old Volkswagen. His journ...

A short film about Pete Seeger and the birth of banjo music throughout the Southern United States....

The bayous of Louisiana have combined French, German, West Indian, native American and hillbilly ingredients into a unique cultural gumbo. Cajun Country investigates Cajun's roots in Western France, visits their cattle drives, horse races, and barroo...

An exploration of the musical and social origins of the blues, shot on location in Mississippi in 1978 by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in association with the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television and broadcast on PBS in 1980. T...

Padstow, a fishing village on the coast of Cornwall, celebrates May Day with an ancient custom: two osses (hobby-horses) dance through the town streets accompanied by drums and accordions. All Padstownians participate in the event, which has now beco...

An examination of the talents and wisdom of elderly musicians, singers, and story-tellers, who perform not for fame or fortune but to preserve and share their culture. Stories told by Janie Hunter (80 years old) of Johns Island, S.C.; ballads sung by...

Alan Lomax and his associates, beginning in the late 1950s undertook a monumental study of the relationship between style in song and dance cross-culturally. It began with Cantometrics which developed a common language description for the many variab...

In the early 1960s, when Greenwich Village was bursting with a folk music revival, the Friends of Old Time Music made it their mission to introduce urban audience to some of the legends of pre-war American traditional music. After a 1961 series of co...

Three separate events: the birth of a litter of pups at a British reform school for delinquent minors in 1946; a dentist's convention in Cincinnati circa 1936; and common place views of New York City in the 1920s as interpreted by a visitor from Ohio...

A celebration of New Orleans' musical culture — from its piano bars and barrelhouses to brass bands and street parades, with their colorful, riotous, and symbolic second lines, in which the community plays an essential part in the performance. Shot i...

Introduces the work of Alan Lomax and his colleagues in developing choreometrics, a cross-cultural method of studying the relationship of dance style to social structure. Shows how the group, including Forrestine Paulay and Irmgard Bartenieff, analyz...