ABOUT THREE WEEKS ago, during my ramblings around the annual High Sierra Musical Festival in the Sierra Valley logging town of Quincy, I found myself making reference to Alan Lomax twice in one weekend. The first came up in conversation with Bay Area photographer Tom Erickson after he told me he had recorded an album's worth of new songs by seemingly MIA singer-songwriter Stephen Yerkey in Nevada City. I joked that Erickson was on his way to becoming the Alan Lomax of indie folk-rock. A few hours later, on Erickson's tip, I traipsed over to a dusty pine grove to catch a riveting set by the Reeltime Travelers. A youthful quartet out of Johnson City, Tenn., the Travelers play pre-bluegrass, old-time country music, rallying their acoustic instruments and harmonizing voices around one microphone and performing such traditional tunes as "Sally Goodin" and "Kiss Me Quick, Papa's Coming," plus old-fashioned originals. When mandolinist Thomas Sneed introduced himself to me the next day, he talked with unbridled enthusiasm about scouring Appalachian backroads for veteran fiddlers, singers, and banjo pickers, sometimes recording the old-timers singing ballad verses from their nursing-home wheelchairs. Again I mentioned the parallel to Lomax's folklorist modus operandi. (Indeed, on their debut CD, Livin' Reeltime, Thinkin' Old-Time, the Travelers recorded a song they learned from Lomax's Sounds of the South.)

Lomax was on my mind because for several weeks I had been immersing myself in a cornucopia of music from the ongoing Rounder Records series, the Alan Lomax Collection. Inaugurated in 1997, the ambitious reissue project aims to release 150 CDs of remastered material from the Lomax archives. (About 80 should be available by the end of this year.) The series comprises 14 different categories, including "Deep River of Song" (African American field recordings made between 1933 and 1946), "Prison Songs," "Caribbean Voyage," "Southern Journey," "Classic Louisiana Recordings," "Italian Treasury," and "Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales." A "Portraits Series" singles out artists who especially impressed Lomax, such as Delta blues giant Mississippi Fred McDowell and Scottish singers Jeannie Robertson and Jimmy MacBeath. And Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), Jelly Roll Morton, and Woody Guthrie are each represented with their own multivolume series. (See www.alan-lomax.com for details.)

During my periods of intense listening, I felt like I was all by myself, hacking my way through a dense jungle of sounds, which included the eerie double-reed sahnai and bowed sarangi on the India volume of the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series; the stirring flute-and-drum and polyphonic vocal music on the Spanish Recordings: Extremadura; and the ferocious banjo picking, rhythmic fiddling, aggressive piano playing, and spine-tingling ballad and blues singing by a single Appalachian renaissance man on Hobart Smith: Blue Ridge Legacy. Other than a few critics and editors writing about this stuff, I didn't know anyone else making forays into what Lomax once called this "ancient tropical garden of immense color and variety."

Then, on July 19, at the age of 87, Lomax died, and my sense of isolation ended. The New York Times ran an extensive obituary on the front page, with Jon Pareles hailing the Texas-born musicologist's role in sparking the folk music revival and doing "whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience." Rockcrit Dave Marsh immediately launched a counterstrike, "Debunking the Myth of Alan Lomax," on StarPolish (www.starpolish.com). He quoted an anonymous "veteran blues observer" about Lomax's "evil venal manipulation of copyright, publishing and ownership of the collected material," noted Lomax's miserly acknowledgment of African American scholar John Work III's role in the "discovery" of Son House and Muddy Waters, and took Lomax eulogizers – such as the Associated Press's Ted Anthony, who wrote that Lomax "changed forever the way the country listened to music" and gave "voice to the voiceless" – to task for celebrating "the milkman more than the milk."