He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.

He was also a folklorist ethnomusicologist archivist writer scholar political activist oral historian and film-maker. After 1942 when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain Ireland the Caribbean Italy and Spain as well as the United States using the latest recording technology assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture. With the start of the Cold War Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore even as academic folklorists turned inward.