
Songs of Ourselves
“For a collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things,” wrote Walter Benjamin in “Unpacking My Library.” “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” Benjamin’s distinction is illuminating in the context of debates over twentieth-century folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax, who died in 2002, has a permanent place in the pantheon of American music—and yet the legacy of the Ivy League–educated white ethnomusicologist is complicated by his role as a collector of folk songs by poor, uneducated artists, many of them black. Lomax traversed the