Max Amounts of Lomax

A treasure trove of Alan Lomax recordings has recently been made available for free listening on the web at the Association for Cultural Equity's website. There's over 17,000 audio files to while away your workdays sifting through.

In case you're not familiar with Lomax, the Rock Snob dictionary describes him thus:

Lomax, Alan: Archivist, foklorist, and musicologist whose field recordings of indigenous performers in the American backwoods triggered the first wide-scale American appreciation of folk, blues, and traditional music - and by extension, gave National Public Radio a reason to exist. Working in the 30's and 40's under the aegises of CBS Radio and the Library of Congress, for which he was helping compile a folk-song archive, Lomax gave Leadbelly and Muddy Waters their first nationwide exposure. Hanging on 'til 2002, Lomax lived long enough to see his field recordings reconstituted by Moby as a dance hits-cum-advertising jingles.

For more info on the online archive, here's a recent NYTimes article about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/arts/music/the-alan-lomax-collection-from-the-american-folklife-center.html