Introduction

There is a specter haunting this essay and this section of the volume: Alan Lomax’s 1968 book Folk Song Style and Culture. Intended by Lomax and his team to consolidate their seven years of comparative research on music, dance/movement, and language, the book also presents many of the ambitious goals, theories, and cultural advocacy projects that Lomax embraced during the late 1950s and continued to promote in the decades to come. Why not, then, just read Folk Song Style and Culture? The book is certainly recommended as a companion to this section containing Lomax’s selected shorter works, but the scholarly articles that appear herein add to our understanding of Alan Lomax’s academic years, providing a better sense for the changes in Lomax’s thought on comparative study and for the increasing scope of his comparative methodology. ¹