Anna Lomax Wood is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and public folklorist. She is the president of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), established in 1985 by her father, musicologist Alan Lomax, at Hunter College, CUNY.
Biography and personal life
Wood was born in New York City on November 20, 1944,. Her mother was Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold, a writer and poet from Blanco, Texas.
Public folklore and folklore activism
Wood served for twenty years as a public folklorist working with Italian immigrants from Northern and Southern Italy and Sicily to produce festivals, concerts, workshops, and music tours. She also worked with Spanish and Greek immigrant artists.
Publishing Alan Lomax's recordings
In partnership with producer and attorney Jeffrey Alan Greenberg (1951-2020), Wood produced, compiled, and edited the massive Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records, a scholarly edition of 100-plus CDs of Lomax's recordings in 16 series—Southern Journey; Deep River of Song (including recordings made by John Avery Lomax, Wood's grandfather), The Spanish Recordings, Italian Treasury, Caribbean Voyage, the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (including Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Romania, India, and Yugoslavia), Prison Songs; Portraits (albums dedicated Lomax's recordings of Fred McDowell, Jeannie Robertson, Margaret Barry, Jimmy McBeath, Harry Cox, Texas Gladden, Neville Marcano, Hobart Smith, Davie Stewart, and John Strachan); Classic Louisiana Recordings; Christmas Songs; Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales; Concerts and Radio; and the Songbook series. Rounder Records made it possible for Steve Rosenthal of the Magic Shop to restore and digitize all the audio in the archive. The scholars and specialists who edited and annotated the recordings include David Evans, Kenneth Bilby, Morton Marks, Donald Hill, Kip Lornell, Judith Cohen, Roger Abrahams, Luisa del Giudice, Sandra Tarantino, Sergio Bonanzinga, Goffredo Plastino, Lorna McDaniel, John Cohen, Steven Wade, Maureen Warner Lewis, Barry Jean Ancelet, Peter Kennedy, Margaret Bennet, Ewan McVicar, Adriana Gandolfi, Domenico Di Virgilio, and Mauro Balma.
In 2005, Rounder issued the 8-CD box-set, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings, which included a reissue of Alan Lomax's 1952, book, Mr. Jelly Roll. The set received two Grammy awards: for Best Historical Album (to Anna Lomax Wood and Jeff Greenberg, Executive Producers, and Steve Rosenthal, Sound Engineer) and for Best Album Notes to John Szwed. In 2009, Harte Records issued Alan Lomax in Haiti, a 10-CD box set of Alan Lomax's historic 1936–37 recordings from a trip undertaken for the Library of Congress, re-mastered and restored from the original aluminum discs. The set included original 1937 photographs and film footage by Elizabeth Harold Lomax; liner notes by ethnomusicologist Gage Averill in English, French and Kreyol; transcriptions and translations by Louis Carl St. Jean; and a book with Alan Lomax's Haitian diary, correspondence, and field notes, edited by Ellen Harold. In 2011, it garnered two Grammy nominations: for Best Historical Box Set and Best Album Notes. With the Green Foundation and Gage Averill, Wood explored returning digital copies of the Haiti recordings and films to communities of origin and to the National Archives of Haiti.
In tandem with publication, Wood launched a systematic effort to locate artists and heirs due royalties and fees from publishing and licensing activities.
Association for Cultural Equity
When her father retired in 1996, Wood took charge of the Association for Cultural Equity to find a home for Lomax's massive archive and bring his most important unfinished projects to fruition. Together with Jeffrey Greenberg, collaborators and staff, including Gideon D'Arcangelo, Matthew Barton, Andrew Kaye, Bertram Lyons, Don Fleming, Kiki Smith-Archiapatti, Richard Smith, Nathan Salsburg, and Ellen Harold, as well as her father's nieces and nephews, John Lomax III, Naomi Hawes Bishop, John Melville Bishop, Corey Denos and Nicholas Hawes, and her son, Odysseus Chairetakis, Wood preserved, digitized and disseminated his archive at Hunter College and depositing the originals at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 2004, which marked the beginning of a close partnership between ACE and the AFC.