two-week lecture tour with Lead Belly on the eastern college circuit in March 1935 (pre-scheduled by Lomax before teaming up with Lead Belly), the two men quarreled over money and never spoke to one another again. John A. Lomax has been accused of paternalism and of tailoring Lead Belly's repertoire and clothing during his brief association with Lead Belly. "But," writes jazz historian Ted Gioia, few would deny the instrumental role he played in the transformation of the one-time convict into a commercially successful performer of traditional African American music. The turnabout in his life was rapid and profound: Lead Belly was released from prison on August 1, 1934; his schedule for the last week of December that year included performances for the MLA gathering in Philadelphia, for an afternoon tea in Bryn Mawr, and for an informal gathering of professors from Columbia and NYU. Even by the standards of the entertainment industry ... this was a remarkable transformation. After his three-months as a performer illustrating John A. Lomax's lectures, Lead Belly went on to a 15-year career as an independent artist, championed and assisted intermittently (but not managed) by Alan Lomax. In 1938 John Lomax visited noted writer Ben Robertson in Pickens County, South Carolina, where Robertson introduced him to the all-day singing festivals of the area which enabled Lomax to preserve the lyrics of many local folk songs. The scope of the collection The Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress contains songs collected in 33 states of the Union and certain parts of the West Indies, The Bahamas, and Haiti. As Curator and Assistant in Charge of the Folk Song Collection John and Alan Lomax supervised and worked with many other folklorists, musicologists, and composers, amateur and professional, all over the country, amassing more than ten thousand records of vocal and instrumental music on aluminum and acetate discs along with many pages of written documentation. In his 1942 introduction to the multi-volume Checklist of Recorded Folk Song in the Library of Congress, Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Library of Congress's Division of Music, wrote: Many hard-working and expert folklorists cooperated in the accumulation of this material, but in the main the development of the Archive of American Folk Song represents the work of two men, John and Alan Lomax. Starting in 1933, the Lomaxes, father and son, traveled tens of thousands of miles, endured