Unabridged Audiobook
I wanted to like this one more. Alan Lomax was a critical force in bringing folk and blues to the general public. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the author knew what audience he was writing for. In some ways, the book felt more like an attempt at a doctoral thesis rather than an entertaining biography. He spends a lot of time "telling" but almost no time "showing." The book was, at times, painfully tedious. And even when presenting a truly astounding moment--the fist fight between an aging Lomax and and equally aging Albert Grossman after Lomax went out of his way to publicly insult The Paul Butterfield Blues Band at Newport, he just brushes past it. The book is full of data. But not full of entertaining anecdotes.
The narrator does a good job with a interesting read that drags a little near the finish when all the talk of metrics of analysis. An interesting life which opened the world to folk music as a Universal Art form.
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