In addition to his prodigious audio recordings of traditional music, Alan Lomax also made a PBS television series about American folk traditions, American Patchwork. FOR SALE NOW
In 1951 Lomax made Oss Oss Wee Oss, a film with George Pickow and Peter Kennedy about the Mayday celebration in Padstow, England called . A remastered video of this film is part of Oss Tales, a DVD by John Bishop and Sabina Magliocco that includes a revist to Padstow's Mayday in 2004. FOR SALE NOW
The orginal Land Where The Blues Began, as broadcast in 1980, is being prepared as an extended DVD, with two hours of additional video.
Alan Lomax and his associates, begining in the late 1950s undertook a monumental study of the releationship between style in song and dance cross-culturally. It began with Cantometrics which developed a common language description for the many variables in performance style in the diverse cultures of the world and measured how those variables clustered geographically and in relation to means of subsistence and aspects of social organization. Choreometrics continued this investigation into dance and he made four films about this research. Rhythms Of Earth is a DVD of these four films: Dance and Human History, Step Style, Palm Play, and The Longest Trail; and a new film about the history and ideas motivating the research. DVD will be released Fall 2006.
For more information about Alan Lomax, please check the Association for Cultural Equity website, and the linked article..
Alan Lomax & John Bishop circa 1978