New York ? Alan Lomax, the celebrated musicologist who helped preserve America’s and the world’s heritage by making thousands of recordings of folk, blues and jazz musicians from the 1930s onward, has died. He was 87.

Lomax was the son of folklorist John A. Lomax, whose 1910 book “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads” was a pioneering work in the field of music preservation. Among the famous songs it saved for posterity was “Home on the Range.”

Two songs from the younger Lomax’s collection were featured on the 2002 Grammy-winning soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

Lomax died Friday at Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Fla., according to Lisa Kissinger of Vinson Funeral Home. Kissinger said she didn’t know the cause of death. Lomax had moved in 1996 to the Tampa area from New York.

Alan Lomax was still in his teens when he began assisting his father’s efforts to interview and record musicians of almost every stripe.

Long before tape recording became feasible, the work entailed lugging around recording equipment that weighed hundreds of pounds.

Lomax said making it possible to record and play back music in remote areas “gave a voice to the voiceless” and “put neglected cultures and silenced people into the communications chain.”

Among the famous musicians recorded by the Lomaxes were Woody Guthrie; Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly; “Jelly Roll” Morton; Muddy Waters; and Son House.

Much of their work was done for the Library of Congress, where the Archive of American Folk Song had been established in 1928.

As interest in folklore and minority groups’ culture has grown in recent decades, experts and fans alike have been able to draw upon the recordings made so long ago.

When interest in Cajun music and its cousin, zydeco, exploded in the 1980s, for example, a two-album set of the Lomaxes’ recordings from the 1930s was issued.

The Lomaxes “were recording people who were old then, and taking machines to houses and recording home music,” Louisiana folklore expert Barry Ancelet, who edited the album, said in 1988.

Lomax’s book “The Land Where the Blues Began” won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. It documented the stories, musicians and listeners behind blues music.

“It’s not preservation, it’s process,” Lomax said. “It’s keeping things going.”