He bagged them in the Scottish Highlands, in the backwoods of Appalachia and on chain gangs in Texas.

He was Lomax the Songhunter and he traveled the globe for decades with a bulky tape recorder to preserve local folk music before it disappeared into the electron ether of the modern age. And we are in his debt.

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) and the fruits of his vocal safaris are the subject of a PBS documentary tonight made by Dutch filmmaker Rogier Kappers, who made a mistake that Lomax didn't: Kappers got there too late.

Setting out to chronicle Lomax's quest in 2001, Kappers found him the victim of a stroke, unable to make himself understood. So Kappers found another way to tell the story.

He retraced Lomax's steps and found the people Lomax had recorded or their descendants and replayed for them the poignant music nearly lost to time. It had passed for generations down a daisy chain of mouth to ear, mouth to ear, and even the singers, when they could be found, had all but forgotten the tunes.

Were it not for Lomax and his 60-pound recording machine, the music would have faded from human memory like the morning songs of birds gone extinct.

Though Lomax, through his life, occasionally stumbled on the famous or to-be-famous -- Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger among them -- it was his association with the fanfare of the commoners that most excited him.

He savored music that had function in their lives, songs women sung together while preparing fabric, the ballads that captured the history of family and home, the mournful dirges prisoners used to keep in synch on work crews. It was unique in cadence, vocabulary and verve.

Two years after his death, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress acquired Lomax's archive and united it with pre-World War II recordings he had made for the institution. It is so large in volume that curators have yet to examine or hear it all.

But for an hour tonight, his work returns to life and though scratchy, dusty and vaguely far away, it plays delightfully on the ear.

Lomax The Songhunter

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