Alan Lomax made a career out of helping our cultural memory. He traveled the back roads to find and record folk music, to capture it for all time -- and to find an audience to celebrate it. At an April conference, it was his turned to be remembered and his life's work celebrated.

Lomax, who died in 2002, was the subject of a two-day program of tributes and conferences in New York. Recalling the early decades of his career, participants talked and, of course, sang for days to make their point.

According to an April 14, 2003, article in the New York Times, one participant likened Lomax to the Chinese emperor Wu, who had his music bureau start collecting songs in the 2^nd century BC.

Lomax recorded authentic players and singers of the Delta blues, Texas cowboy songs, Appalachian folk singers. He drove across the south and the midwest, traveled the Caribbean islands and across southern Europe. Everywhere he went, he found music in danger of being forgotten. Thanks to his work, we still have it.

The conference final was a tribute show at Cooper Union featuring Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers, and others. At the concert, Seeger remarked that "Alan will live on in the people who learned songs from him, and that's millions of people."

And perhaps not just people. As musical consultant to Carl Sagan and the Voyager interplanetary probe, the man who tried to ax the power cables when Bob Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk festival helped assemble the program of world music that is still riding on a special gold-plated disc, now entering the emptiness just beyond our solar system.