Moby Speaks Out On Music Historian Alan Lomax's Death

NEW YORK (Moby Fans Website) - Alan Lomax, the music historian whose field recordings were sampled on Moby's 1999 album Play, passed away Friday (July 19) in Safety Harbor, Fla., at age 87.

A few of the most recognizable of Lomax's recordings on Play was on the track "Honey," which also appeared on the Permanent Midnight soundtrack, and on "Find My Baby."

In a post on Moby's Web site on Sunday (July 21), he writes, "I just wanted to take a moment to offer my sincere condolences to his family members and to take note of his remarkable and enduring contribution to our culture. The world is a richer place for having had Alan Lomax in it, even for a brief while."

Moby spoke to allstar in depth about Lomax's influence on Play in a May 1999 interview. In it he said, "A friend of mine is a music journalist and he was sent [Lomax's] Sounds of the South box set from Atlantic Records. He lent it to me and I took it home and just fell in love with the quality of the recordings. As an electronic musician, I like the fact that a lot of the vocals are a cappella, so I was able to sample them and makes songs around them."

Lomax spent much of the 1930s and '40s traveling with his father, folklorist John A. Lomax, to record folk musicians they encountered, mostly in the Deep South and the Caribbean. Among the artists they recorded were Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, and Muddy Waters. After his father's death, he continued on with the work and released several recordings and books.