In recent years, there’s been an uptick in Lomax samples-songs ranging from Jay Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas In Paris” to Bryson Tiller’s “502 Come Up” are just some of the tracks that have made use of his catalog. He honed in on spirituals, gospel songs, and the blues, and although those reflected part of the music of the black community, he excluded other styles that he viewed as too cosmopolitan or influenced by white music.īack in 2012, some 17,000 of Lomax’s recordings were digitized by the Association For Cultural Equity (ACE), a nonprofit he started in 1983, and put up for free listening online. Critics have accused him of exploiting minorities and creating a segregated portrayal of the black music experience based on what he chose to record. Lomax is an icon, but his musical contributions didn’t come without controversy.

Though the younger Lomax was not a musician himself, his collection of recordings helped popularize America’s rural musical traditions, which in turn led to the blues-inspired rock ‘n’ roll explosion of the 1950s and the folk revival of the 1960s.

He started recording as a teenager in the 1930s alongside his father, John Lomax Sr. While it’s easy to miss these subtle sounds, they’re actually carefully chosen samples with a history that takes “FREEDOM” back even further, to the time of the anti-black Jim Crow segregation laws in the late ’40s and ’50s in the Deep South.īoth samples were recorded by the late Alan Lomax, a folklorist whose field recordings are some of the only to capture slice-of-life scenes from black America in the first half of the 20th century, back when Jim Crow laws were in full effect. If you listen closely, you can also hear a mysterious chorus of voices crying out from under the organ, as well as another set of lower-pitched moans right before Beyoncé’s second verse. It’s a fitting intro for a powerful ode to the black experience in America, as the organ evokes psych-rock, a genre that began during the 1960s Civil Rights era. “FREEDOM”-a standout track from Beyoncé’s LEMONADE-opens with the swirling sound of a mashed organ.

Alan lomax recordings