Fatherhood Quote by Alan Lomax

Validation doesn’t arrive here as a critic’s verdict or a chart position; it arrives as a felt response, passed hand-to-hand. Lomax frames “great songs” not as an objective category but as something a singer “learned” through the emotional evidence of two listeners - father and son - who treated the material as worth reverence. That’s the tell: folk authority in Lomax’s world is relational. A song becomes “great” when it survives intimate contact, when it convinces someone up close before it ever faces a crowd.

The sentence also sketches the quiet machinery of cultural gatekeeping while pretending it’s just a story of discovery. “The audiences that we found” sounds casual, even benevolent, but it signals how access is curated. Lomax isn’t only documenting tradition; he’s routing it. The performer “went out and sang them” implies a shift from private repertoire to public product, from community function to staged presentation. That’s a hallmark of Lomax’s era: folk music becoming legible to broader America through tastemakers, recordists, concert circuits, and radio.

“Tremendous reaction” is the payoff, but it’s also the argument. Lomax wants the audience’s enthusiasm to ratify the earlier intuition - proof that these weren’t quaint artifacts but powerful works. The subtext is a defense of folk music’s seriousness, and a justification of the mediation required to make it travel. It’s affectionate, yes, but also strategic: feeling becomes evidence, and evidence becomes permission to amplify.