Anna Lomax Wood facts for kids
Anna Lomax Wood is an American anthropologist. She also studies music from different cultures (an ethnomusicologist). She helps share traditional arts and culture with the public (a public folklorist). Anna is the president of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE). Her father, Alan Lomax, a famous music expert, started ACE in 1985.
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About Anna's Life
Anna Lomax Wood was born in New York City on November 20, 1944. Her mother was Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold. She was a writer and poet from Blanco, Texas.
Sharing Culture with People
For twenty years, Anna Lomax Wood worked as a public folklorist. She helped Italian immigrants from different parts of Italy share their culture. She organized festivals, concerts, workshops, and music tours. She also worked with Spanish and Greek artists who had moved to the U.S.
Sharing Her Father's Music
Anna Lomax Wood helped publish a huge collection of her father's recordings. This was called the Alan Lomax Collection. It included over 100 CDs of music he recorded. These recordings came from many places, like the American South, Spain, Italy, and the Caribbean.
One special project was the 8-CD set Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings. This set won two Grammy Awards in 2005. Anna Lomax Wood was one of the executive producers for this award-winning collection.
In 2009, a 10-CD set called Alan Lomax in Haiti was released. It featured recordings Alan Lomax made in Haiti in 1936–37. This set also received two Grammy nominations in 2011. Anna worked to return copies of these recordings to the communities in Haiti.
Anna also made sure that the artists or their families received payments for their music.
The Association for Cultural Equity
When her father, Alan Lomax, retired in 1996, Anna took over the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE). Her goal was to find a home for his massive collection of recordings. She also wanted to finish his important projects.
Anna and her team worked to save and digitize Alan Lomax's archive. They made digital copies and then sent the original recordings to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 2004. This started a strong partnership between ACE and the Library of Congress.
A key part of ACE's work is "repatriation." This means returning cultural materials, like recordings, to the communities where they came from. Anna believes cultural resources should be in the hands of the people who created them. In 2006, ACE started a big project to return Lomax's recordings and photos to the Caribbean. By 2020, this program had reached over 50 places. These included libraries and local groups in the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, and Italy.
Anna and the ACE team also created a free online archive. It has all of Lomax's recordings, films, and photos. On January 30, 2012, The New York Times reported on this new online archive. It also has a YouTube channel with many video clips. These videos show American folk songs and traditions. As of February 2021, the channel had nearly 28 million views!
Anna also started the Endangered Cultures Initiative at ACE. This program helps communities record their own traditions. A community member learns to document their music, dance, and stories. The community then owns these recordings and can decide how to share them. For example, Dominic Raimondo, a "Lost Boy" from South Sudan, recorded his tribe's culture. Lamont Jack Pearly is also documenting African American storefront church traditions.
The Global Jukebox Project
The Global Jukebox is a special website. It shows how songs, dances, and speech from around the world are connected. It has almost 6,000 examples of traditional music. Alan Lomax first started this project in the 1990s.
In 2017, Anna Lomax Wood and her team updated The Global Jukebox. They made it available on the internet for everyone to use.
Awards
- Grammy nomination for Best Historical Box Set: Alan Lomax in Haiti, Harte Records, 2011
- Grammy Award for Best Historical Box Set: Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, 2005
- Cavaliere in the Order of Merit, Republic of Italy, 1980 (This is a special honor from Italy)
- Emmy nomination for In the Footsteps of Columbus NBC-TV, 1976
