Alan Lomax, like his father before him, spent his life on an odyssey of unrecorded sound, searching the world for the essence of music and lost songs of isolated cultures. He was a musical prolific anthropologist and folklorist and would go on to make more than seventeen thousand field recordings of singers and songwriters.
Had he not done this the world of music today would be very different.
Also important to how music evolved in the 50s and 60s was the 19th C work of Francis James Child - the child Ballads are a collection of 305 Scottish and English folk ballads and their American variants that he collected. Songs, many of which were recorded by the folk singers of the 50s/60s, and influenced many including Joan Baez who recorded a number of them